Miguel Sangalang Confirmed by City Council as Bureau of Street Lighting Director

LOS ANGELES, CA (April 21, 2021 The Los Angeles City Council today confirmed the appointment of Miguel Sangalang as the new Director of the Bureau of Street Lighting (LA Lights).

“Miguel is a proven leader with an innovative approach and the expertise to make our communities safer, more livable and more equitable through our street lighting infrastructure,” said Los Angeles Board of Public Works Vice President Aura Garcia. “As the new director of LA Lights, Miguel will continue to passionately serve Angelenos and guide the future of street lighting and emerging technologies.”

As Director of LA Lights, Sangalang will take a lead role in the upkeep and improvement of the city’s 220,000 street lighting infrastructure assets, closing the digital divide and the adoption of new tools and practices to ensure the city meets the needs of its residents now and into the future.

Sangalang previously served as Deputy Mayor for Budget & Innovation for Mayor Eric Garcetti. He directly oversaw the annual city budget, performance management, personnel, risk management, procurement reform, technology infrastructure, as well as sustainability, equity in service, gender equity, data, emerging technologies and the local implementation of Census 2020.

“Working to make Los Angeles a better place to live has been both humbling and a great joy and I am deeply honored by Mayor Garcetti’s and City Council’s confidence in my abilities to do more in this new role,” said Sangalang. “I am excited to work with the women and men of Street Lighting to make our lights not just infrastructure, but neighborhood assets that are essential components of quality of life and a shining reflection of our communities.”

With more than 13 years in public service, Sangalang has been instrumental in shepherding high priority initiatives. Some of his earlier work for Mayor Garcetti includes CleanStat, which changed the approach to illegal dumping cleaning from a reactive, request-drive process, to a proactive, data-driven model, and MyVoiceLA, the city’s first centralized reporting tool for harassment and discrimination.

He led the creation of the city’s open data portal early on in the administration and helped lead the City to certification as Platinum for ISO37120 (indicators for a sustainable city and quality of life), Gold certification for What Works Cities, and three recognitions as the #1 digital city by Govtech.

He has also been an ardent champion of transformative technologies for city operations and helped prepare Los Angeles’ pandemic response by investing in strategic technologies, such as backbone server and network infrastructure, the new mobile worker program, and most recently, the Angeleno Account and Connect.