(Sarabeth Henne/DD)
A subcommittee tasked with addressing the urban heat island problem in Phoenix is still developing its recommendations for action. Their recommendation will be based largely on work that was presented to the city by a citizens’ committee earlier this year.
The Urban Heat Island/Tree and Shade Subcommittee is set to share its recommendations with City Council by March 2019. The subcommittee, which operates under the Environmental Quality and Sustainability Commission (EQSC) holds open monthly meetings; the next one will take place this Thursday, Oct. 11 at City Hall at 1 p.m.
Most everyone agrees that Phoenix’s increasingly high temperatures are a problem. But not everyone agrees with the path the city has taken to solve that problem.
One of those people is Stacey Champion. She was part of the original Citizen Tree and Shade Committee that pushed Phoenix city officials to prioritize adding shade coverage to the city, as reported by the Arizona Republic.
This citizens’ committee was separate from the current subcommittee: a self-organized group of people, spearheaded in part by downtown advocacy group The Urban Phoenix Project, which felt strongly that Phoenix should be doing more to address its rising temperatures.
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Champion expressed her frustration that the city still hasn’t taken any action on its Tree and Shade Master Plan since that plan’s completion in 2010. When asked which U.S. cities are showing Phoenix up on their efforts to mitigate climate change, she was blunt.
“Pick one,” she said. “It’s embarrassing.” She added that Phoenix is “already chasing the caboose” when it comes to confronting its urban heat island issue.
The citizens’ committee that Champion was a part of laid the foundation for the current subcommittee. Subcommittee chair Sarah Porter, an EQSC commissioner who said she regards Phoenix’s urban heat island as the most important existential issue facing the city, said she greatly appreciates what that original citizens’ committee did to push the issue forward.
“That group really made it easy in many ways, because they did so much work,” Porter said. She said she believes the subcommittee’s recommendations will affirm the majority of those proposed by the citizens’ committee, although she doesn’t think “every dash and dot” of the original proposition will be adopted.
Porter is also more understanding of the time it’s taken the city to move on the matter.
“I don’t think it’s that unusual for cities to adopt visionary policies like the Tree and Shade [Master] Plan, and then forget to have someone make sure it happens,” Porter said.
Three members of the original citizens’ group now serve on the subcommittee, including Dwayne Allen, who co-chairs the group alongside Porter. EQSC chair Colin Treteault, who put the sub-committee together, said that’s no accident.
“The composition of [the subcommittee] is that there are multiple people, actually in a disproportionate manner, representing that tree and shade citizens ad-hoc committee … in comparison to any other stakeholder overall,” Treteault said.
He said the commission is working on scheduling an evening in the fall when back-to-back meetings for the subcommittee and the larger commission can be held at a location other than City Hall. That could facilitate more public discussion on the urban heat island topic, a point that sub-committee member Nicole Rodriguez brought up in last month’s meeting.
Rodriguez, a certified arborist who was also on the original citizens’ committee, is adamant that to successfully move the Tree and Shade Master Plan forward, more public input is needed at the monthly meetings. Particularly, she said she’d like to see more people in attendance who care about and have knowledge of trees, such as other arborists and land architects.
For Porter, the major key to success will be ensuring that in the future, someone employed by the city is responsible for the Tree and Shade Master Plan.
“We need somebody whose job it is to make sure this happens,” she said.
Contact the reporter at mduerig@asu.edu.
