LA City installs new solar street lights

Tonight, Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass is touting her success in getting new streetlights installed, getting broken ones repaired. The mayor and the City Council member Hugo Soto Martinez held a community meeting tonight in Hollywood. It just wrapped up. Fox 11's Laura Diaz was there. She joins us now live Laura. Yes, Glenn and Christine, we're standing right by Selma Park, which not so long ago used to be a notorious homeless encampment. Now it's been cleared and the lights are on, and you can imagine people who live in this area were overjoyed to see the light in this neighborhood. Our goal remains clear. Keep our neighborhoods safe so we're eliminating our street light repair backlog and installing solar lights. There are some things that have gone on in this park in the past that weren't so great. So I feel like it would make me feel safer as a woman walking down here with my dogs. Get more light around here. It feels more safer, especially, you know, us walking around with our dogs. So I think it's good for that. That young couple told us they were newly arrived to Hollywood. They've lived here about two months, but they certainly had a sense of the neighborhood. Now we arrived early to this news conference today. Our Fox 11 cameras captured the repair of one of those solar lights, a little rolling up of the sleeves with some hard work and some machinery. And voila, there was light. Mayor Bass and Councilman Soto Martinez highlighting their partnership. The goal is to replace up to 60,000 street lights and eliminate L.A.'s 32,000 plus backlog of street replacement. Now, we know, of course, that copper wire theft has plunged many neighborhoods into darkness. That's not just Southern California. It's a problem that exists across the country. But tonight, the mayor and the councilman... Highlighting the importance of these new solar lights, which they say are an alternative to the other lights and the copper wire thefts. In fact, the mayor talking about the fact that they know sooner replace them that they were stolen right afterwards. And so they were finding themselves. in kind of a rotation that they didn't want to be part of and that's why they explained tonight how important it was to have these solar lights. So we got a little bit of a tour about how that's achieved. I'll have more for you at nine o'clock to explain that and also I asked the question was it too little too late? The mayor talking about that at nine and ten o'clock. I'm Laura Diaz reporting live from Hollywood. sending it back to the studio. Laura, in the meantime, paint a picture of where you're at. Looks like it might be a mix of businesses and residential. Looks like a neon light behind you, which screams to me business. Yeah, I mean, you can see the YMCA is right here. Obviously, this is a corner that's very important to people who live in the area. The park that they cleaned up that used to be that encampment. I'm told and I haven't been here in the daylight that children are now using it to play and that this is all about quality of life. That's why I thought they thought it was so very important. We all know from covering the news how important it is to have a lighted street. Sometimes it's starting with the small things that expand into the great things so that people can feel safe. They can walk in their own neighborhoods. We all want the ability to do that. But again, I'll have more with the mayor in the later shows. Talking about why it took so long and her sense of what was coming in the future. Reporting live in Hollywood, sending it back to the studio.