Thanksgiving 2019 - While I have a lot to give thanks for personally this Thanksgiving, I am particularly grateful that a project I conceived of nearly five years ago and helped lead up until the summer of last year is finally becoming reality now thanks to perseverance, leadership and, perhaps most importantly, the quiet generosity of some key people in our community.

As I write this, the visionary innovators at Labyrinth Technologiesare about to begin deploying a SMART Infrastructure lighting system on behalf of Downtown St. Louis Inc. that will not only make our downtown safer and more beautiful, it will make our city one of the smartest in North America with technology that goes way beyond illumination (I think imagination will be operative word). Check out this video to see the vision.

This is the first phase deployment of a $4.6 million project DSI announced in June to upgrade the network of approximately 2,500 cobra streetlights throughout a 360-block area of downtown St Louis as part of a privately financed Project #LightMYStL .

The story behind our journey to this point is nothing short of remarkable.

While I’ve often said that if pessimism was a product, St. Louis would likely lead the nation in production, our story shines the light on what is positive and right about our community.

Against the odds, and at times in the face of the type of tsunami-strength headwinds of cynicism that far too often define efforts at civic progress in St. Louis, we are about to do something transformative for our community.

It is a story of earnest intentions and stubborn stick-to-it-ness (think Provel Cheese on the roof of your mouth).

Through good old-fashioned St. Louis ingenuity, and the kind of quiet, behind-the-scenes civic leadership that it takes to get something done in our community, we are about to do something that promises to make us the envy of the nation.

To understand how remarkable and inspiring the journey has been, you have to understand where we started.

It was early January 2015. The day that Mayor Slay chose to convene a group of concerned downtown stakeholders to talk about crime downtown proved to be one of the coldest of the year. I’ll never forget it, because Joe Walsh, the Director of Security for the St. Louis Cardinals, and I opted to walk to the meeting. A little more than halfway into our walk, at the Serra Sculpture, we ran into David Freese, walking his dog. We were all too cold to chat long.

It turned out that the frigid temperatures outside were matched by the chill in the room at the SLU Law School as virtually every key downtown stakeholder come prepared to share deep and serious concerns with the Mayor and his leadership team that had assembled at the request of DSI.

While crime had been a problem in our city for quite some time, things seemed a whole lot worse that winter. The community’s collective mindset was shaped by a series of brazen crimes that had recently taken place in the central business district of St. Louis.

There is no other way to say. It was bad. It was a dark time in downtown St. Louis.

Downtown St. Louis was suffering from horrible headlines and elevated fears rubbed raw from a regional community grappling with the aftermath of Michael Brown’s death in Ferguson that prior August.

During the meeting, when the conversation turned to practical solutions to make downtown safer that our business community could help fund, I suggested upgrading the network of cobra lights downtown along the lines of what Saint Louis University did on their campus.

Instead of having a solid blue LED light bar on the arm of the cobra like that have on SLU’s campus, we could deploy a color changing light bar that could be adjusted to “decorate” downtown. We could make it red to support the Cardinals, blue to cheer on the Blues, Pink for Komen, Green for St. Patrick’s Day etc. By converting to LED lights, we would save the city money and improve lighting. With the decorative element in place, the public would realize that efforts were underway to make it safer.

The reaction in the room to the idea was warm. Todd Waelterman from the City Streets Department promised to look into the feasibility of the idea. Ellen Sherberg of the St. Louis Business Journal suggested paying for the upgrade through an adopt-a-light effort in the business community.

Energized by the promise of progress, for the next seven months I worked independently to forward the idea with city officials through several meetings and conference calls. I consistently raised the issue with the Executive Committee of DSI whenever the topic of crime came up in our meetings during that period, which was often. Invariably, our dialogue would lead to the same basic wish list:

More Police. More cameras. Better lighting.

I personally continued to focus on the lighting . Almost to an annoying extent. Just ask anyone who has been around me for the last five years.

I didn’t make much headway during this initial phase trying to just be a squeaky wheel on the topic. It lacked a unifying vision and team mentality. That was about to change.

On September 9th , as the Cardinals hosted the Chicago Cubs during an afternoon game downtown, I prepared a seven-page vision and work plan for the lighting project, giving it the name Project #LightMyStL , with the tagline “ Enhancing Safety While Innovatively Lighting the Heart of Our Region .”

I mailed and emailed a copy of the plan to Missy Kelley, who had just assumed the role of President & CEO of Downtown St. Louis In, volunteering to lead the efforts to assess the feasibility of moving forward with the project.

At that point, I had already begun my outreach to SLU and had participated in several detailed conversations with the streets department.

A few weeks after I drafted the vision plan and proposed to DSI that we form an action committee to forward the idea, a former Marine named Christopher Sanna joined his family at Friday night Cardinals game to help celebrate his mother’s birthday. As Chris and his wife were walking to their car a few blocks east of Busch Stadium, they were robbed at gunpoint and Chris was shot in the back, leaving him paralyzed. It was awful.

Immediately following that, Missy Kelley organized a call with our DSI board leadership to discuss proactive actions the business community could immediately take to make downtown safer. We immediately authorized the purchase of additional License Plate Reader cameras for the police department and we also endorsed moving forward with improving lighting downtown.

I was thrilled we had the support of the board to move forward with the plan. I was and am grateful for Missy’s leadership in supporting the initiative. We formed an action committee to vet the feasibility of moving forward with #LightMySTL. We met at Busch Stadium during the fall of 2015. We were intentional about the word “action” in our committee name because we were sensitive to the paralysis by analysis that plagues so many efforts in town.

Let’s get together to study an issue, but nothing actually comes from it. We had talked this issue of crime downtown to death, sadly without much to show for it.

Anyway, we assembled a wonderful cross section of individuals to vet the concept. Downtown residents, local law enforcement, city streets department officials, architects, engineers, lighting experts, downtown developers, a disproportionate number of Cardinals front office employees and other stakeholders all participated.

The key individuals early on were Keith McCune from SLU and John Villa from Villa Lighting. They helped us understand the SLU project.

Jared Opsal, who represented the Downtown Neighborhood Association, helped us better understand the needs of our downtown residents. Give Jared credit for suggesting that our new lights illuminate not only the street, but also the sidewalk. He was vocal about how some of the new lights the city had installed actually made things darker, which made walking more hazardous.

Initially we were only able to identify impediments to advancing the project, while struggling to make headway on how the challenges could be surmounted. I was starting to feel a bit of despair at that point, when a friend shined a light.

The big breakthrough came thanks to Tom Wong, whose daughter Sienna was classmate of my son Charlie at Elaine Rosi Academy. He brought Ted Stegeman to the table with a team of companies that made us realize a customized solution was available where no off the shelf solution existed. I literally had tears of joy the first time I saw their customized solution.

In late 2015, just after Thanksgiving that year, we hosted a design challenge. Some of the biggest names in lighting participated. To help us vet the participants, we engaged Randy Burkett Lighting, a local lighting expert recommended to us by several developers.

It was Ted Stegeman’s group that won the day with his superior customer-focused design. He developed a system that illuminated both the street and sidewalk, and that could be controlled and monitored from a computer. They could independently control each light’s decorative element. These were much more than lights, they formed an encrypted mesh network with edge computer processing that would eventually break new ground in the space of IoT.

To make a very long story short, we successfully raised $400,000 to do a 1.4-mile demonstration project on Market Street that deployed just before Thanksgiving 2017.

Key individuals stepped up to raise the money to make the demonstration project a reality. Bob O’Loughlin of LHM, Bill DeWitt of the St. Louis Cardinals, the Cordish Companies, the St. Louis Blues, SLU, Washington University, Rex Sinquefield and others. I can tell you that Mike Matheny, Bill DeWitt and John Mozeliak all went bat to make the demonstration project a reality.

The market street demonstration project proved to be an amazing success. The deployment exceeded everyone’s expectations.

During the Spring of 2018, Labyrinth Technologiespartnered with Electric Cab Company of North America to show how the SMART lights could stay in constant communication with a moving cab. The reason this is relevant, is with the full deployment of lights downtown, we will have one of the largest encrypted mesh networks in North America. We will be able to add a host of IoT devices to enhance the urban experience for people.

With the addition of micro positioning technology, we believe we could make autonomous cab service a reality downtown. Not only will the car have sensors, but the streetlights will also have sensors looking further down the road. The lights and the car will be in real time communication making things safer.

It was at this point during the summer of 2018 that I stepped down from my role as incoming Chairman of DSI. I had left the St. Louis Cardinals to form my own start-up company, StorySMART Creative Social Media.

While I stepped away from the project for a few months, during the fall, I was later engaged to help the group organize their fundraising and community outreach efforts.

We were overjoyed to have Bob O’Loughlin sign on as the fundraising chairman the day before Thanksgiving last year. By the end of the year, all of the major local television stations in town pledged to be media sponsors, as did Entercom, KTRS and FOX Sports Midwest. The community was coming together to make this project a reality.

In the meantime, the team at Labyrinth Technologies was improving the lighting system so that the next generation lights would set the standard with best-in-class efficiency, and raise the bar with the first, patented tunable luminaire. These streetlights not only light the street and sidewalk, they can be tuned to variably light the street and sidewalk. They can literally be powered up to daylight levels on command and then dimmed down on command. Want more light on the sidewalk, but less on the street, no problem, these lights can do it. They are fully customizable.

They also feature a smart brain capable of communicating bi-directionally. They feature iBeacon technology, meaning they can interact with your mobile device. Perhaps, most importantly, additional IoT devices such as sensors and surveillance can be easily added to the system. This will make our city safer, while also enhancing the urban experience for residents and visitors alike. How about a parking sensor that tells you were all the open spaces are to park? Pretty cool stuff.

#LightMySTL is about a community coming together. Thanks to an inclusive process that involved input from various different downtown stakeholders, the customized lighting system we had developed by Labyrinth Technologies is unlike any other street lighting system in the world.

While there is much more story to tell, my real point in sharing this Thanksgiving post is to thank all of the amazing people who made it a reality and shine the light on the project.

Ted and John Stegeman. Missy Kelley. Bob O’Loughlin. Bill DeWitt. Tom Stillman. Jared Opsal. Captain Renee Kriesmann. Marybeth Johnson. Heather Bacon. Chris Molina. Joe Walsh. Tom Wong. Alex Rodrigo. Ron Kurtz. Ken Gabel. Barbara Birkicht. Laura Slay. Rex Sinquefield. John Villa. Keith McCune. Father Biondi. Deanna Venker. Todd Waelterman. Robert Gaskill-Clemons. Mayor Lyda Krewson. Mayor Francis Slay. Ellen Sherberg. Fox 2/KPLR 11. KMOV. KSDK. KMOX. KTRS. KEZK. Y98. Now 96.3. FM Newstalk97.1. FSM. The list goes on and on. They are all S t. Louis Light Saviors in my book.

#LightMyStL is about a community coming together to make downtown St. Louis safer, smarter and more attractive. We did it all by working together, acting on input from key downtown stakeholders, local law enforcement and lighting experts.

Most importantly, we would not allow the naysayers or challenges along the way derail our efforts to improve the one neighborhood our entire region calls home.

I think we can all give thanks to that!