LMU Hosts LA Mayoral and California Gubernatorial Candidates
Conor Boland: Mayor Bass, you just released your budget. Many people are frustrated about infrastructure, including the streets and potholes. More specifically, how long it’s taken Metro and LAX to build their projects.
We know that DWP has again closed the reservoir for repair in the Palisades too. Now my question for you is: what is the plan for the next four years taking from your current budget to plan for the building of infrastructure and prioritizing these services?
Bass: Absolutely. Thank you. I think that’s a great question and believe it or not, one of the things that I found coming home and working as mayor is that there’s so much of our city that is really out of date, meaning that the city is functioning still on paper. We did not have, in the nation’s second largest city, a comprehensive infrastructure plan. Surprise, things like what you described happened.
Now Metro and the LAX, that’s a whole different subject. So I have, for the last couple of years, worked on a comprehensive infrastructure plan, which we are ready to release and should be releasing in the next few days, that lays out a method, a timeline, a strategy for how to deal with our city’s infrastructure, and that includes everything.
But let me give you one example because one thing you didn’t mention was streetlights. And streetlights has been something that has really been a problem in all of our neighborhoods. So what the city did is we would replace copper lights.
Well, OK, we’re going through this national crisis of copper theft.
So why do you replace copper lights when you can deal with your environmental goals, and there’s nothing to steal if it’s solar? And people, what they would say to me is, “It’s cheaper to replace copper.”
It isn’t cheaper because two weeks later you’re gonna have to replace it again. So I launched a program just a few weeks ago to install 60,000 solar lights around the city, and that is gonna deal with the entire backlog of streets being out.
The other thing that I did in early on was call on LAPD to do a copper wire task force, but that’s whack-a-mole going after the people that steal copper. I wanna go after the people that buy copper.
