With less than a month to go until the Super Bowl, the City of Phoenix has been preparing for the infusion of visitors from around the world to participate in the pre-game and post-game festivities as well as watch the spectacle that will likely enhance local sales and business tax revenues.
Since the New Year, the City has held ceremonies or participated in events that:
- Unveiled a completed 190-foot Welcome to Phoenix Mural between First and Second Street on Adams.
- The resumption of direct flights, through American Airlines, from Phoenix to Monterrey, Mexico.
- Broadcasting a “Future is Phoenix” Public Service Announcement highlighting some of the fifth-largest city in the nation’s strongest features like its growing semiconductor industry and the ability to take driverless Waymo’s to dinner destinations.
- Promoting a greener Super Bowl Event by perhaps becoming the first city “taking the food wastes from the downtown NFL events and turning it into compost.”
- Putting out the Super Bowl LVII Roman Numerals at Margaret T. Hance Park.
Phoenix is also Planning for the Next Ten Years.
While also planning for the Super Bowl festivities, Phoenix Mayor Kate Gallego and the City Council have also been working on building the fifth-largest city in the country for the remainder of this century. Previous articles have described the efforts city leaders have made in making Phoenix a Mecca in biosciences, the semiconductor industry, modernizing transportation, and green sustainability programs like the new Electrification plan, tree planning initiatives, and the repaving of city streets.
Now, after setting up a 16-member leadership committee, the city has opened up the process for city residents to participate in the crafting of the next ten-year Phoenix General Plan (also known as planPHX) which would be: “the long-range guide for designing the city’s future. It addresses a wide array of issues including energy, housing, equity, sustainability, neighborhoods, public facilities, natural resources, transportation, and land use.”
Commenting on the new ten-year plan, (the finished version voters will decide on in 2024,) Mayor Gallego stated:
“The Phoenix General Plan will be community driven. The members of the planPHX 2025 Leadership Committee will have the critical and exciting responsibility of developing a draft plan that considers how Phoenix will be structured, how it will grow, how it will operate, and how it will serve its citizens.”
“This time, we face new challenges. PlanPHX will need to consider climate change, housing, land use for advanced manufacturing that draws high-paying jobs, and a host of other issues that have emerged over the last ten years.”
At a meeting of the Phoenix City Council, the Mayor expressed hope that:
“We’ll celebrate the link between water planning, water supplies, and land use planning that has always been a challenge for us as a desert city but is growing increasingly more pronounced with long-term drought and other challenges…We have a great record of leading on water and land use planning but that we can hopefully really innovate and take it to the next level…We can think about land use planning as we move towards a higher and higher wage economy with tech corridors and really thinking about what out tech industry and advanced manufacturing needs to thrive in this community…”
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