Q+A Odis Jones Detroit Public Lighting Authority

摘要

In 2013, Odis Jones returned to his hometown of Detroit with the mission of restoring reliable street lighting to the city. Detroit was days away from declaring bankruptcy, and its lighting system was plagued by burned out bulbs and theft. As CEO of the newly formed Public Lighting Authority (PLA), Jones had to both rebuild the lighting system one/find a way to pay for it during a financial crisis. It wasn't easy. "I was happy to be back in Detroit, but the scale of what we needed to fix was daunting," Jones says. "At that point, 40 percent of the streetlights in the city did not work, and the ones that did work were running on outdated and unreliable technology. Eighty percent of the street lighting infrastructure was either decayed or obsolete." Still, Jones and his team at the PLA managed to install 36,000 new streetlights in the first year. The Authority's goal was to relight neighborhood streets, then collector streets, and finally the downtown district and eight major thoroughfares. Upon the project's completion, 65,000 LED streetlights are slated to illuminate Detroit. Here, Jones talks about how he overcame the challenges he faced and helped restore civic pride to the city of Detroit.