In fiscal year 2021, it took San Diego city crews an average of 144 days to fix a broken streetlight.
This fiscal year, the same repair takes 340 days, according to a newly released city audit.
During those six years, the Transportation Department’s streetlight division hired more workers. The division paid $1.4 million in overtime last fiscal year, compared with more than $230,000 six years earlier.
Despite the longer waits for repairs and the increase in overtime spending, department managers did not use available tools to track workers and ensure work was being completed, according to the audit.
From December 2025 through May 2026, city auditors examined vehicle logs and found that workers’ vehicles were stationary for several hours a day away from job sites or locations with reported streetlight outages. The stops averaged 2 hours and 25 minutes and totaled nearly 200 hours during the six months examined by the City Auditor’s Office. One stop lasted 4 hours and 42 minutes, according to the audit.
Streetlight division managers failed to address the lengthy stops and periods of crew inactivity, the audit found.
On Nov. 12, the San Diego Audit Committee discussed the findings and objections from the Transportation Department. Department officials said the audit relied on flawed information and that the City Auditor’s Office failed to notify them of the alleged timecard violations before releasing the report.
In an Oct. 14 response, newly appointed Chief Operating Officer Bethany Bezak wrote:
“Department leadership was not notified of fraud hotline allegations until June 2026, at least seven months after it was reported, despite ongoing audit discussions throughout that same period.”
Bezak also said city auditor investigators used misleading baselines in the report.
“Management recommended using the early 2021 backlog of 5,520 as an appropriate baseline for comparison rather than mid-2020 because it more accurately reflects the status of streetlight repairs in 2021 following a significant increase in the backlog during a period of massive vacancies due to COVID,” Bezak wrote.
City data analyzed by Times of San Diego show 14,306 streetlight repair requests citywide. Downtown San Diego has the highest number of requests, with 2,525, followed by Peninsula neighborhoods with 1,036, Pacific Beach with 841 and Clairemont Mesa with 597.
At the Nov. 12 Audit Committee meeting, Interim Transportation Director Naomi Chavez said that while the department will address the audit’s findings, managers must navigate multiple city data programs.
The streetlight repair backlog increased after a February 2025 decision to have department electricians focus on requests from residents and construction crews seeking to locate underground utilities, also known as DigAlerts.
“We receive about 6,000 DigAlerts per month, with electricians going out to perform 43% of those locations,” Chavez said after the City Auditor’s presentation. “It became clear that we simply weren’t keeping up with the incoming demand of the DigAlerts, exposing the city to potentially significant liability.”
Following Chavez’s statements, representatives from unions representing city employees criticized the City Auditor’s Office for failing to notify the unions about the alleged timecard violations before releasing the report.
Audit Committee member Stewart Halpern later asked City Auditor Andy Hanau why his office did not notify the department or the unions before releasing the report.
“It’s our prerogative under the city charter and state law,” Hanau said. “In this case, there have been 18 prior hotline reports about similar issues in transportation.”
Hanau added, “The department never looked at any broader pattern.”
