Tom Randa runs Good Neighbor Community Center, which became a key partner when Lincoln announced its Heat Response Plan in May 2025. His organization would open daytime cooling spaces, run bilingual heat safety workshops, arrange transportation to cooling sites. The plan correctly identified the populations most at risk: seniors on fixed incomes, newly arrived families adjusting to an unfamiliar climate, households without reliable air conditioning.
What the plan didn't provide: any systematic way for Randa to track whether he's reaching them.
Lincoln's heat response looks solid on paper. But Randa coordinates ground-level implementation through institutional knowledge built over years, informal networks, and direct relationships with vulnerable families. When heat advisories go out, he knows some families won't understand what "heat index" means. When he has limited fans to distribute, he makes decisions about who needs them most based on what families have told him directly. When temperatures hit 108°F in June 2025, he's working from a mental list of who might be suffering. Not a tracking system. Not data showing where help is needed most. A mental list.
An elderly woman in the Malone neighborhood has air conditioning but rarely runs it. The electric bill means choosing between cooling and groceries.
A Sudanese family that arrived last winter stood in his center last June, holding their phones, confused by a text alert about a heat advisory. In English. Using terminology they'd never encountered. What did "heat index" mean? What were they supposed to do? They'd experienced heat in Sudan, but not this humidity, not these specific numbers and warnings.
He knows about households without AC because families tell him directly, usually after they've already been suffering through multiple 100-degree days. He knows about elderly residents because neighbors mention them. He knows about immigrant families because they come to his center for other services and mention, almost casually, that they're not sure how to stay cool when it gets this hot.
So Randa makes daily decisions about distributing limited fans, coordinating transportation, keeping cooling spaces open during heat waves. Nebraska experienced 691 emergency department visits for heat-related illness between May and September 2024, but Randa can't access Lincoln-specific data. Can't see which neighborhoods are getting hit hardest. Can't track whether the people he's trying to help are ending up in emergency rooms anyway.
The infrastructure exists. Cooling centers at libraries and rec centers during business hours. Fans distributed through Aging Partners. A three-tiered alert system that activates when the heat index reaches 105°F. What doesn't exist is any systematic way to know if that infrastructure is reaching the people who need it most, or what happens when it doesn't.
Nebraska currently experiences 15 dangerously hot days per year, rising to 44 days by 2050.
For next summer, Randa is planning differently. He's thinking about families who still might not understand the alert system when temperatures hit 105°F again. He's thinking about the decisions he'll face when demand exceeds supply. He's looking at the climate projections: 15 dangerous days rising to 44. Temperatures projected 4°F higher by mid-century, days above 95°F increasing by about 15 more per year.
Forty-four dangerous days means more heat advisories. More moments when he'll have to decide who gets limited resources first. More calls from worried neighbors. More families suffering through heat waves because they don't know help exists or can't access it during library business hours or won't seek it because of immigration status fears.
Other cities have created infrastructure to track this ground-level reality. Phoenix established an Office of Heat Response and Mitigation. Minnesota and Wisconsin documented that heat-related illness rates are significantly higher in rural areas than expected, but only because they were tracking implementation data by location and demographics, seeing where the plan was failing before people ended up in emergency rooms.
Randa doesn't have that infrastructure. He has his mental list, his organization's relationships with immigrant communities, his knowledge of which neighborhoods lack resources. He has a plan that correctly identifies who's most at risk.
What he doesn't have is any way to systematically track whether he's reaching them. What barriers are preventing access. Whether the decisions he's making about limited resources are the right ones.
Next summer, when it hits 105°F and his phone rings with another worried neighbor, he'll make the same impossible calculations. He'll keep that mental list. He'll coordinate transportation and distribute fans and open cooling spaces. What he won't have is any way to know who he's missing until someone calls to say they're worried.
Or doesn't call at all.
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Rural heat vulnerability: Minnesota and Wisconsin research revealed that heat-related illness rates are significantly higher in rural areas than in metropolitan areas, challenging assumptions about urban heat islands being the primary concern.
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Phoenix's coordinated approach: Phoenix created an Office of Heat Response and Mitigation in 2021 that coordinates cooling spaces, rental unit requirements, and emergency utility assistance across departments.
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Northern Plains acceleration: The Northern Plains region is experiencing faster temperature increases than other parts of the country, with North Dakota's average temperature increasing faster than any other state in the contiguous United States.
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Omaha's projected future: Climate models project that by 2050, Omaha could experience more than twice the days per year with maximum temperature above 90°F compared with the 1961-1990 average of 27 days.