It’s Lights Out in Sepulveda; Issue Switches to West Valley

The Valley street light controversy burns on.

While city officials agreed Friday to fix the 24-hour-a-day lights in a Sepulveda neighborhood, the city councilman who represents the area was asking why so many street lights in other parts of his district haven’t been burning at all.

Councilman Hal Bernson asked the City Council’s Public Works Committee to investigate the street light problem. The committee will take up Bernson’s request later this month.

A city spokesman acknowledged Friday that 1,500 new street lights in Northridge and Chatsworth had not worked for weeks but he contended that they have recently been fixed.

Councilman Saw Story

Bernson made the request after reading a story in The Times Friday about homeowner Lester Fishman’s inability to get the city to turn off the street lights during the day on several streets in his Sepulveda neighborhood. The lights have burned 24 hours a day since about Dec. 13, Fishman said, complaining that they were wasting taxpayers’ money.

A spokesman for the Department of Water and Power, the city agency responsible for the lights’ operations, said Friday that a crew would repair the lights in Fishman’s neighborhood by today. He attributed the problem to a light switch damaged in December storms.

DWP officials were aware of the broken switch but said that restoring light in areas blacked out by the storms was a higher priority. Some of these lights are still out. But, on Friday, DWP officials decided to go ahead and fix the lights Fishman had complained about anyway.

“We don’t like to have unhappy customers,” said Richard Owen, superintendent of power distribution for DWP. He denied that the newspaper report of Fishman’s prolonged effort to get action had anything to do with DWP’s quick change of mind.

Bernson, meanwhile, said his office has received about 50 calls during the last few months--even before the storms knocked a lot of lights out of service--from constituents complaining about non-working street lights. He said the complaint from Fishman was the first he heard about lights not going off.

George A. Eslinger, director of the city’s Bureau of Street Lighting, said Friday that the problem with the lights outside Fishman’s home has nothing to do with non-working lights in other parts of the West Valley.

Faulty Device

He said about 1,500 new street lights in the West Valley have not worked because of a faulty electrical device installed as part of the city’s changeover from the white-shining incandescent lights to high-pressure sodium lights. The sodium lights are more energy-efficient and glow yellow.

Eslinger said the problems were limited to sections of Chatsworth and Northridge because that was where the new device was first used.

He said the device has since been redesigned to work properly.

“I believe the problem is resolved,” Eslinger said. “It’s been three or four weeks since I heard of the last outage.”