Everyone is talking about the June 2 primary election in California, especially the results in LA. But there was another election on June 2 that you might not have heard of, as you needed to own property to vote in it.

The election, known as a Proposition 218 Ballot Process, will determine whether LA property owners will pay a special tax assessment to raise money to replace broken streetlights with solar-powered ones.

Special ballots were mailed in April, and were due June 2. The vote count is ongoing, and results will be announced on June 26.

The issue has arisen because of rampant copper wire theft, which is disabling streetlights across the city.

Keeping the streets lit in America’s second-largest city is no easy task under normal circumstances. With upward of 223,000 streetlights, including an underground network of 9,000 miles of conduit and 27,000 miles of copper wire, the city of Los Angeles’s streetlight network illuminates the city’s roads and neighborhoods for its millions of residents.

Unfortunately, copper wire theft has risen to substantial levels, as a result of soft-on-crime policies and an overstretched police force that has plagued the City of Angels for years.

Instead of addressing the root of the problem, Mayor Bass and most of the LA City Council backed a Prop. 218 tax to raise $125 million to replace and update streetlights. Many of the new ones would be solar-powered. 

Updating public infrastructure is not bad; however, the current approach does not address the underlying problem of high rates of copper theft, which creates a strong incentive for people to commit the crime in the first place.

The tax would also raise property owners’ fees by up to 120% in an already extremely expensive place to live, given that Angelenos pay over 55% more than the national average for energy.

In 2023 alone, there were 6,842 reported cases of metal theft, leading to the creation of the LAPD’s “Heavy Metal Task Force,” which was tasked with combating the problem.

Unfortunately, in classic LA fashion, even though it was formed with good intentions and initially yielded promising results, it was disbanded by the omniscient leaders of the city in July of 2025 due to budget problems.

When copper wire thieves are caught, they have a high rate of reoffending. This high rate is driven by laughably low enforcement, low penalties, and the difficulty of catching offenders before they commit multiple crimes, given how easy it is to steal copper wire from streetlights.

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Under California Penal Code § 487j, those who steal copper wire valued at more than $950 commit grand theft, which can be punished as either a misdemeanor or a felony, depending on the value of the stolen copper and the number of prior offenses the person has committed. 

However, with a local justice system operating more as a revolving door than anything else, even with a maximum penalty of a $10,000 fine and up to three years in state prison, many are likely to commit copper wire theft repeatedly before being stopped. And they are likely to do so again upon release from prison — if they are imprisoned at all. 

When a copper wire thief steals a few hundred dollars’ worth of copper, he or she causes thousands of dollars in damage. Each streetlight can cost up to $2,000 each to fix, costing taxpayers up to $20 million a year. 

When presented with a solution — a hardened cover for each streetlight at the cost of $300 each — the city of Los Angeles decided to ignore the practical and financially responsible choice and moved forward with pushing to convert thousands of streetlights to solar at upward of $6,000 per unit.

The solar decision was also political, designed to conform to the city’s LA100 Plan to achieve 100% carbon free power by 2035. But it won’t actually solve the underlying problem of theft.

Criminals have already demonstrated a willingness to scale streetlight poles to steal not only valuable core components, but the entire solar panel itself, which renders the streetlight useless.

Even solar panels that survive have inconsistent output due to weather conditions. They also require battery replacement every three to five years, costing an additional $150 to $1,000 per replacement.

June 26 is the day of the city’s final consideration, after the ballots have been counted, to determine whether the assessment passes.

The city of Los Angeles should take this time to develop real solutions to end its revolving-door-like criminal justice system, rather than converting 60,000 streetlights to solar power, which doesn’t solve the underlying problem of rampant crime. 

Caleb Jasso is a senior policy advisor at the Institute for Energy Research and a native of California.