Arizona Establishes First ‘Chief Heat Officer’ To Mitigate Desert Life

The Arizona Department of Health Services (ADHS) has hired the state’s first-ever “Chief Heat Officer,” an individual tasked with mitigating the effects of the state’s notorious heat.

That doctor, Eugene Livar, was hired as part of the Extreme Heat Preparedness Plan released by Gov. Katie Hobbs and Office of Resiliency (OOR) Director Maren Mahoney last week. Livar’s responsibilities consist of fulfillment of the governor’s plan, which he helped develop through his work on ADHS heat preparedness recommendations. Livar will also coordinate with state agencies to establish shelter, energy, health, and disaster responses.

Livar has worked for ADHS since 2012, first as an epidemiologist focused on border health and unexplained deaths, a program manager for the Healthcare-Associated Infections (HAI), chief of the Bureau of Epidemiology and Disease Control within the Office of Disease Integration Services (ODIS), and then assistant director for Public Health Preparedness. In that last role, Livar earned about $149,000 a year.

In addition to Livar, ADHS hired a cooling center coordinator to manage county coordinators statewide.

The Extreme Heat Preparedness Plan reviewed the recent actions undertaken by Hobbs and plans for this upcoming year, many of which focus on the homeless.

Last year, Hobbs spent American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) funds on heat relief services, which included the opening and staffing of shipping container cooling centers for the homeless. The latter also had showers and beds. The Hobbs administration further arranged for state employees to staff these cooling centers, and receive regular duty pay in the process. Hobbs’ plan announced her intent to create at least six new, mobile, solar-powered shipping container cooling centers.

These cooling centers don’t have a reliable source of funding. According to the plan, the Hobbs administration plans to secure federal grant funding from the Infrastructure and Investment Jobs Act and Inflation Reduction Act to make up for the exhaustion of ARPA funds and donations.

For the upcoming fiscal year, Hobbs’ budget plans to increase funds to heat mitigation and emergency response, including a $10 million revolving loan fund consisting of state and federal funding for local governments’ heat mitigation and emergency response. Hobbs’ plan also announced her intent to have ADOH give more funding to nongovernmental organizations for homeless heat respite overnight.

This fiscal year (2024), the Arizona Department of Economic Security (ADES) gave low-income families up to $1,200 in welfare to cover their home energy bills. The funds came from the federal Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program (LIHEAP).

ADES also issued another $1,000 to those eligible for “crisis assistance”: those who have had a utility shut-off or notice of delinquency, those whose benefit payment doesn’t cover their full utility bill, those who received an eviction notice, those who use portable fuel or pre-pay utility service and have a week or less of energy available, those for whom termination of power or exposure to heat or cold would endanger their health according to a physician’s assessment, and those for whom life supporting equipment depends on utility service for operation.

The Arizona Department of Housing (ADOH) also gave out $1.46 million to cities for heat, cold, and air quality mitigation: $500,000 to Tucson, $370,000 to Flagstaff, $500,000 to Phoenix, and $90,000 to Verde Valley.

OOR also plans on rolling out $13 million in grant funding for rural electric and gas improvements ensuring grid reliability.

Since last July, the Industrial Commission has implemented workplace inspections for heat-related illnesses and injuries through the Heat Stress Emphasis Program (SEP). The commission completed 73 inspections as of January. This year, they plan to conduct 12 inspections each month.

The plan also proposed three sets of five goals: long-term, emergency response, and other.

The five long-term goals: growing the trades workforce with those skilled in weatherization and energy efficiency; increasing heat mitigation design requirements in affordable housing; transferring permitting authority for manufactured home accessory installations from local jurisdictions to ADOH; securing an increase in Arizona’s LIHEAP funding; and covering or protecting delinquent utility bills accrued by Arizonans during the summer months, when public utility providers can’t shut off service for nonpayment.

The five emergency response goals: passage of federal legislation to increase federal funding, such as the Extreme Heat Emergency Act; creation of a singular definition for an extreme heat event and data-based, AI-informed refinement of heat response efforts; establishment of long-term disaster recovery task forces; establishment of neighborhood resilience hubs, which would provide two or more weeks of energy, refrigeration, clean water, food, and state and federal aid; and development of a threshold for declaring a heat emergency, such as limiting outdoor military activities at temperatures greater than 110.

The five other goals: quantify the costs of extreme heat and benefits of statewide heat mitigation efforts; grow “clean” energy economy; increase research on heat impacts and solutions, such as heat maps; launch multilingual public education campaigns; and expand state data systems’ coordination and detail on heat-related topics, such as air conditioning status, drugs with the highest safety risks in heat, and low-income heat mitigation resource availability.

Hobbs justified the cost and scope of these initiatives as necessary to address the steady rise in temperatures and heat-related deaths. The governor’s chart of heat-related deaths within the Extreme Heat Preparedness Plan didn’t distinguish between those deaths caused by heat and those deaths in which heat played a role alongside more serious comorbidities, like drug usage or overdoses.

A majority of 2022 heat-related deaths were attributable to drug and/or alcohol usage, 54 percent of which occurred in the homeless. 53 percent of all heat-associated deaths involved meth.

The increased fixation on Arizona’s characteristic heat as problematic despite the progressive availability of modern comforts and amenities may be attributed to something scientists coined the “adaptive comfort model”: the negative effect of air-conditioned environments on heat tolerance. The adaptive comfort model could explain the disparity between the lowered heat tolerance of modern Arizonans and the greater heat tolerance of our predecessors: the Indians that resided here for centuries, the pioneers and settlers of the Wild West, and the first Arizonans from just over a century ago.