The heat office wasn’t created to maintain the status quo.

I loved this Daily interview with Dave Hondula, the Director of Heat Response and Mitigation for the city of Phoenix, “the country’s first publicly funded office in city government working on heat”:

Barbaro: …All of which is to say that being the Chief Heat Officer at a place like Phoenix means coming up with great ideas and realizing that they’re very hard to pull off within the bureaucracy, and rules, and realities of a city government.

Hondula: And I would argue it means being a little persistent and being willing to try to ruffle some feathers a little bit, but through those experiences, we’ve generated a little saying among our team. The heat office wasn’t created to maintain the status quo. So all of those rules, processes, institutional memories that you referenced, in some cases I see it as our job to try to shake those up a little bit…

The Man Trying to Save Phoenix From Historic Heat