On March 19, Dean Scheinert decided to open Justa Center to everyone. The downtown Phoenix day center normally serves only older adults experiencing homelessness. Scheinert, the executive director, extended hours to 7 a.m. through 6 p.m., let anyone in off the street, and started handing out water and sack lunches. Nobody told him to do this. No funding covered it. His contract with the city to operate as a heat relief site starts May 1. It was 105 degrees outside, the hottest March day in Phoenix's recorded history, six weeks before the city's heat response infrastructure was scheduled to exist.
"Typically, we only work with seniors who are experiencing homelessness," Scheinert told KJZZ, "but we want to be open and available to provide water and sack lunches to folks who need a break while on the streets."
Phoenix's 2026 Heat Response Plan, passed unanimously by city council in late February, contains 23 actions organized for summer. A 24/7 respite center. Extended library hours. Expanded outreach to mobile home parks and senior communities. The operational season runs May 1 through September 30. The National Weather Service's average date for the first 105-degree day is May 22. The NWS issued its first-ever March Extreme Heat Warning for Southern Arizona that week, and the Heat Relief Network map, the primary tool residents use to find cooling sites, wasn't expected to go live until May 1 either.
Scott Hall, deputy director of the city's Office of Homeless Solutions, put it plainly: "Our 24/7 heat relief operation starts May 1st and that's why we have to get these outreach opportunities in place."
Someone walking through Scheinert's door that week would have found libraries and community centers on regular hours, some closing at 4 p.m., some shuttered on weekends. The 24/7 respite site that the city's own director of homeless solutions had called "an essential lifeline" last November wasn't running. Overnight, temperatures weren't dropping below 100. Kim Beaudoin, communications manager for Keys to Change, which operates the Key Campus nearby, described what that does to a body: "It's non-stop exposure, right? Even at night, it's not getting below 100 degrees. Your body isn't able to re-regulate and take that break from the heat."
Scheinert had opened to a general population his staff doesn't normally serve, and the people walking in that week showed it, bringing clinical questions nobody had budgeted for. Beaudoin described the problem her own teams face constantly: "Those behaviors can look similar to somebody who's used drugs or somebody who has dementia. These symptoms have a lot of overlap. It's a matter of making sure our staff know what to look for." At St. Vincent de Paul nearby, programming director Andrew Peters watched what happens when someone comes in from 105 degrees:
"Within 30 minutes after somebody entered our facility, they immediately succumbed to heat exhaustion. If that person didn't have us there, they probably would have died."
The population absorbing this heat is larger than it was a year ago. After federal ARPA funding for over 1,000 shelter beds expired in 2024–2025, the unsheltered count in Maricopa County spiked 28 percent. People experiencing homelessness are more than 100 times more likely to die of heat than the general population here. And the same ARPA money that built the cooling network is in its final year.
The ARPA dollars that kept people sheltered and the ARPA dollars that keep cooling centers open are the same stream, drying up at once.
Scheinert knows what his new city contract represents. It gives Justa Center an extra month of funded operation compared to last year's county arrangement, starting May 1 instead of June 1. "That's a big deal," he said, "because of how intense the heat is."
It is a big deal. And it was five weeks too late. Dr. David Hondula, director of the Office of Heat Response and Mitigation, acknowledged as much:
"We are constantly talking about the operational heat season May 1st to September 30th and how flexible we can be on the ends of that and this is a good reminder that flexibility is really important."
The week of March 19, flexibility looked like Dean Scheinert opening a senior center to everyone on his own authority, with no contract covering the cost, recognizing heat illness in people his staff hadn't been trained to serve, because the season arrived before the plan did. The people who walked through his door were real. The heat was real. The system designed to protect them starts in five weeks.
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ARPA's final year: The 2026 heat season will be the last supported by American Rescue Plan Act funding for expanded cooling relief in Maricopa County, with no confirmed replacement funding stream in place.
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More people outside: After pandemic-era shelter funding expired for over 1,000 beds, Maricopa County's 2025 Point-in-Time count showed a 28% spike in the unsheltered population, meaning more people will face summer heat without housing than in any recent year.
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Deaths inside homes: More than a quarter of Maricopa County's 2025 heat deaths occurred indoors, often in homes where air conditioning existed but wasn't working or wasn't powered, a pattern that cooling centers alone cannot address.
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Calendar mismatch everywhere: Phoenix isn't the only city where dangerous conditions are outrunning seasonal plans; the National Interagency Fire Center issued its first 2026 Fuels and Fire Behavior Advisory this week for over 100 million acres of the Great Plains, where wildfires have already burned half a million acres before spring.