Shining a light on...lights

In 2019, Cody Lusnia took 5,750,958 steps and walked 2,410 miles.

During that year, he went through five pairs of sneakers, two sets of Bluetooth earbuds and seven containers of pre-workout supplement.

Yeah, it amazes us as well.

A lot of those steps were taken in downtown Oklahoma City where Cody lives and at his side was his dog Rip. Rip is named after Rip Van Winkle because for the entire week after Cody adopted him from the Midwest City Animal Shelter in 2013, all Rip did was sleep.

Looking back he was probably just resting up for the long walks 2019 would bring, but Cody says he is “still a very big fan of sleeping.”

If you say the name Cody or “Twitter Cody” or “the street light guy” in City Hall people know who you are talking about.

This is mainly because in 2018, after months of walking the streets of Oklahoma City’s core and downtown, Cody noticed that there were a lot of streetlights that were dark.

To highlight his concerns and the problem, Cody decided he would map the outages using a smartphone app to record the GPS coordinates and then export the data into Google Maps.

“Me: The streetlights aren't working Them: Call it in Me: ........ So I'm gathering data. This is the first sample run on a roughly 8 square block area. 78 streetlights out. I will be devoting 1 hour a day to gathering this data, mapping streetlights that don't work,” Cody said in a Jan. 8, 2018 post on Twitter.

“I hope to open this mapping up at some point to the public, but first I'd like to gather some overwhelming data to demonstrate that the current system is irretrievably broken,” he wrote in the same thread. “Also the data will allow us to hold people accountable.”

Cody’s frustrations were not just the lights that were out and not being repaired, but also the mechanism to report outages.

"There isn't a process when you report lights out," Cody said in an interview with the Innovation Team. "You can't track online or see a map of lights out. I don't even know if OG&E knows where all their lights are."

In Oklahoma City most streetlights both along the highways and on City streets are maintained by OG&E, but not all of them.

There are private lights that people or businesses have requested OG&E to be install on their property. The security lighting cost is usually around $8 a month for the electricity.

There are also lights installed on properties that supplements both public and private lighting.

Then there are lights installed by the City as part of districts, special projects and initiatives like Project 180, a $176 million redesign of downtown streets, sidewalks, parks and plazas.

A lot of the lights that Cody reported were lights installed during Project 180 over the last ten years in the central park of downtown.

So with all of the different kinds of lights and different people responsible who do people call – the City’s Action Center, OG&E or do you have to contact the property owner for the private lighting?

It can be and is confusing.

So much so that a year or so before Cody’s map, the City’s Action Center started allowing residents to report streetlight issues to the City through their app, text and online. Before they would pass people directly to OG&E or provide a number. This allowed Action Center staff to compile a list of complaints submitted the previous day and send to OG&E each morning at 7 a.m. through email. Residents could report to the City or OG&E, it didn’t matter.

At the same time Cody was mapping issues there was an increase in the number of lighting complaints on social media sites not just downtown, but throughout Oklahoma City’s neighborhoods and on highways.

There used to be a common saying about never picking a fight with someone that buys ink by the barrel. It referred to the power of newspapers and communication.

On social media, when it came to lighting issues there were a lot of users slinging ink out of the barrel of their phone.

It is because of his efforts and others who took to sites like Twitter, Facebook and Nextdoor that the City and OG&E came together to have weekly meetings, improve communication between both of our organizations, implemented new reporting features and present regular updates on the status of highway streetlight repairs to Mayor and Council.

That is one of the many reasons we asked Cody to sit down with us as we look at neighborhood issues affecting our residents.

His sneakers to the ground approach shined a light on a problem and brought people together to address it.

Over the years, his voice has also brought to light other concerns including abandoned contractor signs on sidewalks, potentially dangerous construction issues and process improvements.

As far as the Project 180 lighting, Public Works has been working to get those lights back on and converted to LED in batches of 20.

They are hopeful that all of the Project 180 lights will be retrofitted to LED and repaired by spring 2020. Already more than 200 of the 700 street and pedestrian lights have been replaced. The repair and conversion is taking longer than expected because the new hardware is specially made for those poles and the company is shipping them to the City as fast as they can make them.