The numbers are staggering. According to SanDiegoVille's analysis of San Diego's publicly available Get It Done records, updated October 26, 2026, more than 8,300 streetlight complaints have been open for over a year, while 4,617 have languished for more than two years. The median unresolved complaint is 455 days old, meaning half have been sitting in the system for approximately 15 months or longer.
One complaint, filed April 11, 2019, near 3026 Midway Drive, remains classified as "In Process" more than seven years later. Another, near 829 Garnet Avenue in Pacific Beach, has been open since August 2019. Every Council district has at least one complaint dating back more than five years.
Whether these lights remain broken or were repaired without their complaints being closed is unclear. Either way, the City's own records paint a troubling picture of its ability to track and resolve basic maintenance requests.
The investigation comes alongside an 81-page performance audit from City Auditor Andy Hanau that identified serious management failures, questionable overtime documentation and a repair backlog that nearly tripled from 2,684 requests in fiscal year 2021 to 7,552 by July 2026.
But one of the audit's most revealing findings concerns geography. Approximately 71% of streetlight repairs completed during fiscal year 2026 occurred in Council Districts 1, 3 and 9, which contain Community Parking Districts funded through parking-meter revenue.
The reason is surprisingly simple. In February 2025, San Diego's Transportation Department largely suspended routine streetlight repairs during regular working hours, directing electricians to prioritize underground utility inspections and emergency hazards. When routine repairs resumed months later, much of the work was performed on overtime funded by parking-meter revenue, money restricted to the districts where it was collected.
"Broken streetlights located outside of CPDs are much less likely to be repaired," the audit concluded.
In other words, where San Diego fixes its streetlights increasingly depends on where it collects parking fees.
Yet SanDiegoVille's analysis reveals that even neighborhoods benefiting from those funds have enormous numbers of aging complaints. District 1, which includes La Jolla, Pacific Beach and University City, has the oldest median unresolved complaint at 615 days. District 2, covering Mission Beach, Ocean Beach, Point Loma and surrounding communities, follows at 612 days, with more than 1,100 complaints pending for over two years.
District 3, encompassing Downtown and several central neighborhoods, has the most open requests at 3,806, including 1,258 more than two years old. By comparison, District 4 has 637 open complaints with a median age of 232 days, although the records alone cannot establish whether that reflects faster repairs or fewer reports.
The findings expose another uncomfortable discrepancy. While the audit identified 7,552 outstanding repair requests in the Transportation Department's records as of July 1, the City's public Get It Done system listed 14,826 open streetlight complaints as of October 26.
The figures measure different things and should not be confused. Get It Done includes duplicate or unverifiable complaints and potentially lights already repaired without their records being updated. The higher number does not mean 14,826 individual streetlights are currently broken. It does, however, raise an obvious question: Why does the City's public reporting system show nearly twice as many unresolved complaints as its official repair backlog?
Meanwhile, taxpayers are spending substantially more for a system delivering increasingly delayed results.
Between fiscal years 2021 and 2026, spending on the Streetlight Repair Program climbed from approximately $8 million to $17.7 million. Personnel costs jumped from $2.3 million to $5.7 million, while overtime expenses exploded from $230,148 to nearly $1.4 million, an increase exceeding 500%.
During the same period, the average repair wait increased from 166 to 340 days. The City's Get It Done system has warned residents to expect approximately 500 days.
City management disputes aspects of the audit, arguing that approximately $6 million of the spending increase resulted from higher electricity costs and that the auditor used a misleading historical backlog comparison. Officials maintain that using an alternative early-2021 baseline would show a 34% backlog increase rather than 181%. The Auditor's Office stands by its findings.
The audit also uncovered troubling gaps in employee oversight. Vehicle-tracking records identified two City vehicles parked for at least 90 minutes on 56 occasions, totaling approximately 198 hours, at locations where management said it was unaware of any streetlight-related work. Additional prolonged stops brought the total flagged time to approximately 333 hours.
Importantly, auditors did not conclude that employees were inactive or improperly paid during those periods. The findings instead highlighted management's failure to consistently monitor vehicle activity and verify work.
Separately, 20 of 127 callback overtime claims reviewed could not be independently verified, although the audit did not establish that any were fraudulent. Of 18 fraud-hotline cases referred to the Transportation Department since 2020, nine were substantiated or warranted corrective action, yet auditors found that management had not examined them collectively for recurring problems.
City officials say investigations were completed and corrective action taken where appropriate, but the Auditor's Office has not independently verified those claims.
The City's formal response, signed by Mayor Todd Gloria's Chief Performance and Logistics Officer Bethany Bezak and Chief Financial Officer Rolando Charvel, agreed to all 12 audit recommendations while disputing several findings. Proposed reforms include improved employee monitoring, stronger overtime verification and more reliable repair tracking, although some are not scheduled for completion until January 2028.
San Diego's streetlight troubles are hardly new. A 2017 audit identified deficiencies in the City's inventory and maintenance records, while a 2023 initiative promoted by Gloria sought to address a backlog approaching 6,000 lights. Three years later, the backlog is larger, repair times are longer and the City's own public records still contain complaints dating back to 2019.
The latest audit establishes that repair activity has been heavily concentrated in districts with dedicated parking revenue. SanDiegoVille's independent analysis reveals that thousands of complaints remain marked unresolved across the city, including in those same districts.
What neither investigation can establish is exactly how many streetlights are currently broken, how many have already been repaired without their records being updated or why some neighborhoods carry substantially older unresolved complaints than others.
For a city spending nearly $18 million annually on its streetlight program, those are questions residents should not have to wait another 500 days to get answered.
Originally published on October 27, 2026.
