Fair Oaks LED Upgrades Wrap With a Custom-Built Fixture at Saint Barnabas

Street lighting crews have finished a run of upgrades around Robinson Park and capped it by fabricating a mounting bracket in-house, letting a new 20-watt LED cobrahead fixture go up on an existing pole in front of Saint Barnabas Episcopal Church, according to the City of Pasadena.

The church at 1062 N. Fair Oaks Ave. sits just south of Robinson Park, at 1081 N. Fair Oaks Ave., in Northwest Pasadena. The fixture is one small unit in a system the Public Works Department’s Street Maintenance and Integrated Waste Management Division maintains — more than 17,000 street and park lights citywide.

A larger replacement program sits underneath the corridor work. Pasadena’s Capital Improvement Program street lighting project is converting aging high-voltage series circuits, on which a single failure darkens every light on the circuit, to low-voltage multiple circuits with energy-efficient lamps. Sixteen circuits carrying roughly 1,063 streetlights still need to be systematically replaced citywide, and the remaining portion of the project’s first phase covers two circuits and about 176 lights, according to the city’s Fiscal Year 2026-2030 Capital Improvement Program. Converting older lamps to LED is expected to cut energy costs by at least 50%.

That budget document names “public safety, as well as worker safety” as the two strongest justifications for the conversion, citing intermittent outages that knock out entire neighborhoods when aged high-voltage equipment fails.

Over the past few years the department received multiple requests about lighting around Robinson Park’s perimeter, according to the city. Crews replaced the post-top and high-mast fixtures along Fair Oaks Avenue between Mountain Street and Hammond Street with LED units, improving illumination along the corridor.

The Engineering Division then received a separate request for the church frontage. The roadway there was already well lit, but a localized area carried lower illumination. Rather than install a new pole or other major infrastructure, the street lighting maintenance crew designed and fabricated a custom bracket that let the new fixture hang from the pole already standing. The city said the addition has improved lighting in the church courtyard and the surrounding area, particularly for pedestrians walking there during evening hours.

Work on the citywide conversion continues in Fiscal Year 2026 on the S-104 circuit along Linda Vista Avenue.

Residents can report a burned-out or missing streetlight to the City Service Center at (626) 744-7311. Street lighting maintenance information is posted at https://www.cityofpasadena.net/public-works/street-maintenance/.