AUBURN — The dramatic holiday “dancing lights” displays that have attracted scores of visitors and have frustrated neighbors in years past will be only half as awe-inspiring this year.

Jamie Loggins, the doctor who has built the expansive light show on his property on Vista Drive for the past five years, will not participate this year, leaving neighbor Stephen Bang to carry on the tradition.

“We’re probably going to have to take this year off,” Loggins said Tuesday. “A lot of things got destroyed last year” by bad weather, he said, and have to be rebuilt. He hasn’t had time to complete the necessary repairs, he said.

“Of course, it’s disappointing,” he said. “It’s sad we’re not going to be able to do something we enjoy.”

Next door, the Bang family has been busy setting up a presentation highlighted by a series of large stars in their yard. Bang joined the spectacle, which has included as many as 150,000 lights synched to a low-power FM radio station, two years ago.

They hope to turn on the lights by Friday, Kaylyn Bang said. But start dates are uncertain due to weather and family schedules, Loggins said.

The show didn’t go online last year until Dec. 18, slowed by a neighborhood disagreement that was ultimately settled by the City Council and a spell of high winds that damaged metal light frames and scattered other holiday props.

Other residents of Vista Drive say the display causes severe traffic blockages on the street, which ends in a cul-de-sac. Those neighbors asked the City Council to make Bang and Loggins pay for traffic control while their show was running in 2010. The council voted against the request.

The down-sized display probably won’t mean less traffic, neighbor Tim Delorme said.

The presentation draws people from well beyond L-A, and on the busiest nights, the street becomes virtually impassable, Delorme said.

“It’s the music that makes people stay here,” he said. “If it was one weekend or one night, we could put up with it.” His house is at the far end of the cul-de-sac.

He and other neighbors spend the weeks around the holidays wondering how long it will take them to get home from work or whether the barely moving traffic will hold them hostage when they want to do Christmas shopping in the evenings, he said.

On Christmas Eve last year, “I had to get out of the car and have (my wife) Angela drive to part the sea to get out,” he said. Drivers who have come to see the lights are sometimes rude or refuse to move to the side of the road while they wait to pass the house, thinking that Vista residents want to cut to the front of the line, he said.

Neighbors haven’t discussed the spectacle as usual this year. “What can you do?” Delorme said.

The best way for visitors to view the lights is to drive to the end of the street, turn around in the cul-de-sac, and watch the show while passing by the house again, according to a website (auburnlights.com) dedicated to the light show. The website says viewers should stop in front of the house only when traffic is light.

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