WATCH: In Senate EPW Hearing, Kelly Welcomes Mayor Gallego, Highlights Phoenix Infrastructure Needs

Today, during a Senate Environment and Public Works (EPW) Committee hearing, Arizona Senator Mark Kelly pressed for federal investments to help fast-growing cities like Phoenix adapt to record-breaking temperatures and the infrastructure demands of a booming tech economy. 

Kelly, who led the creation of the Healthy Streets Program in the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law to fund heat mitigation efforts, such as the deployment of cool pavements, emphasized the need to expand federal support for communities facing record-breaking heat. He also recently introduced the Extreme Heat Economic Study Act to assess the growing financial toll of extreme heat on communities across the country. 

During the hearing, Kelly introduced Phoenix Mayor Kate Gallego, who testified about the urgent transportation, climate, and energy challenges facing one of the fastest-growing metro areas in the United States. 

Kelly underscored the urgency of addressing extreme heat in Phoenix: “As you know, better than probably anybody, Phoenix is an urban heat island experiencing higher temperatures than the surrounding rural areas due to the lack of vegetation and the use of asphalt and concrete that absorb a lot of the heat. An estimated 45% of metro Phoenix residents live in an area where the urban heat island effect raises temperatures by about 8 degrees or more.” 

He also highlighted of the importance of a resilient grid: “I want to talk a little bit about energy. It’s our grid. The grid goes down in Phoenix—the estimates are that somewhere up to maybe half of the residents of the city will wind up in an emergency room if it happens during a certain time of year, in the summer, when the heat is the highest.”  Mayor Gallego echoed these concerns, calling extreme heat “a national problem” and urging Congress to modernize infrastructure funding to match the scale of today’s climate and energy demands.

Click here to download a video of Kelly’s remarks. See the transcript below: 

Mayor Kate Gallego introduction:  

Sen. Kelly: Thank you, Madam Chair. I am excited to announce my friend and the Mayor of Phoenix, Kate Gallego, to the Committee. Mayor Gallego is only the second woman to be elected the Mayor of Phoenix, and she is one of the youngest big city mayors in the country, and certainly the best.

Now, Mayor Gallego has a wealth of transportation policy experience that I know will be critical to this committee’s discussion today. During the Biden Administration, she served as Chair of the Transforming Transportation Advisory Committee, and she continues to serve as Chair of Climate Mayors, a bipartisan network of nearly 350 mayors across the country who are leading their cities to meet their sustainability goals.

And as a lead negotiator of the Chips and Science Act, I’ve worked closely with Mayor Gallego to boost domestic semiconductor manufacturing in Arizona and bring Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company to Phoenix. This critical investment is generating thousands of jobs and cementing our state as a global hub for microchip manufacturing. It is also part of the growth that is fueling the region that requires smart investments in infrastructure manufacturing to keep up. Mayor Gallego, thank you for testifying today.

As the committee discusses the upcoming surface transportation reauthorization, I know how valuable it will be to learn from your experiences about what Congress can do to meet the transportation needs of urban areas while ensuring that our infrastructure remains resilient in the face of climate change. With that, Madam Chair, I’ll hand it back to you. 

Hearing transcript below: 

Sen. Kelly: Thank you, Madam Chair. Mayor Gallego, thank you again for being here.

As you know, better than probably anybody, Phoenix is an urban heat island experiencing higher temperatures than the surrounding rural areas due to the lack of vegetation and the use of asphalt and concrete that absorb a lot of the heat. An estimated 45% of metro Phoenix residents live in an area where the urban heat island effect raises temperatures by about 8 degrees or more.

This is why I worked to include the Healthy Streets Program, which I think you mentioned in your opening remarks, and we put that in the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, which would fund initiatives, such as cool pavement projects that mitigate the effects of this extreme heat.

So, Mayor, why is it critical for Congress to fund programs that help vulnerable cities like Phoenix become more resilient to the effects of extreme heat? 

Phoenix Mayor Kate Gallego: Thank you for your leadership on that program. We are at a point now where we are going to have to adapt cities to hotter environments. Phoenix now talks to cities all around the country, including in the northernmost parts of our country, about heat challenges. This is a national problem, and we appreciate you coming up with a national solution. The heat can be deadly. We are losing more Americans to heat than any other type of natural disaster, but our infrastructure funding hasn’t caught up with that reality yet. Even some of the coldest states in the country have had terrible heat waves with an incredible loss of life. We know the solutions. There are building changes, design changes, that can save lives. Your program helps cities, communities, tribes get the funding to make those changes, many of which require us to design infrastructure very differently. 

Sen. Kelly: I want to talk about, mentioning electricity here, data centers, chip manufacturing, and other industrial expansion in Phoenix is putting pressure on our infrastructure. And, as our population grows to fuel this technology boom, how does our electrical and transportation infrastructure need to respond? And since this is transportation, maybe we should focus on that? 

Mayor Gallego: So, we are seeing a huge boom in data centers and advanced manufacturing just in the Phoenix metro. The data centers have requested 32 gigawatts of new electricity. The amount of damage, well, the impact this would have on our streets with all of this construction. These are huge construction sites. In our case, we have it in many residential areas, so very high impact. And you’re seeing a lot of truck traffic up. Water has a different impact. But the amount of infrastructure investment is something we really need to talk about. Data centers are very vulnerable to heat. 

Sen. Kelly: And to put the 32 gigawatts into perspective, the current SRP and APS, the 2 utilities, provide about 16 for the entire county right now. So, the request, over a number of years, I think it’s 5 to 10 years, exceeds what is currently on the grid right now. 

Mayor Gallego: It does. This is a trend we’re not talking about enough as a country. What does it mean if, in a few short years, we’re asking our utilities to completely replicate themselves. You, I am so grateful, paying attention to the infrastructure side of that, because the amount of traffic in areas that have not seen traffic. We should probably talk about hazardous materials on our streets that will be going places they haven’t been, and it may be time to have new conversations about that, the data centers. There’s a conversation in Arizona and several other states about small modular reactors, so that would put nuclear material in areas that have not seen nuclear material before. Phoenix is the fifth largest city in the country. Our transportation infrastructure needs your support to navigate that. As do our firefighters and others that will need new types of training. If we are going to see this change, we have to look at how it impacts our street network. There might be some time where we might be able to reduce regulation, particularly around semiconductors. There is some hazardous material regulation that we might be able to update to be able to make it a little bit easier to do business. But it really is time to look at the types of material that will be traveling on streets that have never seen it before and how we have the appropriate regulatory system from the federal government for these issues. 

Sen. Kelly: Thank you, Mayor. Thank you for being here.