The Power of Darkness

The issues were weighty and the politicians powerful. There was the state budget and the future of the most important public hospital on the West Coast.

But the anti-street light people of Sierra Madre Villa Avenue made county government stop and listen.

There were four of them: Wendy Alden, Fred Weideman, Margo Reid and Nancy Holst. They got mad, got in their cars, and told the supervisors a thing or two about street lights.

They don’t like them. Don’t want them--don’t want them showing criminals the way to their neighborhood.

The four homeowners live in the very dark hills above the city of Pasadena, on tiny streets off the larger artery of Sierra Madre Villa in unincorporated territory.

For two years, a group of their neighbors has agitated for some light. It’s too dark, complained two-thirds of the homeowners along the main street, in a petition filed with the county.

It’s too dangerous, they later agreed in ballots they returned to the Department of Public Works.

But they didn’t count on Alden, Weideman, Reid and Holst, who were mad as heck and doubly mad that they didn’t receive notice that the Board of Supervisors was scheduled to approve the lights at its meeting Tuesday.

The four, who charged that the homes of many who opposed the lights were gerrymandered out of the proposed street lighting assessment district, rendering them unable to vote, persuaded the supervisors to postpone their consideration of the matter.

They got the engineer handling the lighting proposal to agree to look into the way the district was drawn, and talked county Supervisor Mike Antonovich into setting up a meeting with residents against illumination.

They were unusual, both in their opposition to street lights, which most neighborhoods clamor for, and in their success.

“This is the first time that [the process] stopped because four people showed up,” said Francisco Castillo, the county civil engineer who has been assigned to the project.

A journey to the neighborhood later in the day revealed it to be a very quiet place where street lights, sewers, parking spots and other accouterments of urban life terminate at the border with Pasadena, about a mile down the hill.

Just the other day, one of Alden’s sons saw a bear in the brushy canyon off the family’s deck.

At night, residents said, it is so dark that you can see the stars.

The neighbors who want street lights say it’s so black at night that the cars that come speeding up the hill--many of them lost, as there is no exit from the top--can’t see curves, bumps, people or other cars.

“It’s a safety issue,” said Patrick Wall, who has lived in the neighborhood for two years and voted in favor of the lights.

Albertina Rapalo, who works on Sierra Madre Villa as a housekeeper, said that in the winter she frequently must walk for 35 minutes to the bus stop along the pitch-black street.

She is afraid of cars, and she has heard talk of a mountain lion cub roaming the hills along with coyotes and that bear.

The pro-lighting neighbors began the petition process in 1996, but the process was put on hold until the county figured out how to implement Proposition 218, the anti-property tax measure that required approval by 60% of an area’s homeowners before assessments could be levied for lights or other services, according to Castillo.

Supporters held a meeting late Tuesday to figure out what to do with the setback dealt by their opponents.

Next week, when the issue returns to the board, Wall and others may find themselves in the same nerve-racking position faced by Holst and the others: trying to figure out what to say that might influence a group of politicians who handle a $14-billion budget and represent the largest county government in the United States.

It was a particularly unnerving experience, Holst said afterward. She had marched down to the county Hall of Administration, expecting to speak to a few bureaucrats in a little meeting room.

She had not anticipated the imposing chambers of the Board of Supervisors, where armed deputies and locked doors separate the elected officials, perched high above the auditorium, from members of the public.

Despite their success, she, Alden, Weideman and Reid are still mad at the neighbor who organized the street lighting campaign.

“Just you wait,” Holst said after the meeting. “Speed bumps are going to be next. She’s going to try to put in speed bumps.”