City Councils Improvise as the Heat-Dome Emergency Powers Lapse

The heat dome that governed the American Southwest for a month has lifted, and with it the emergency ordinances that let mayors from Phoenix to Albuquerque commandeer cooling centers, suspend daytime work rules and reroute power. Now councils must vote on what stays. In Tucson, the chamber sat until midnight debating whether to make permanent the network of twenty-four public cooling halls that sheltered an estimated forty thousand residents at the dome's peak. "We built this in a panic, and it worked," said councilwoman Diane Ortega, who sponsored the measure. "The question is whether we can afford to keep what a panic built." The tension is the ordinary one of the plus-two-point-eight decade: emergency budgets are elastic, permanent ones are not, and the next dome is a matter of when. For now the halls stay open on temporary funding through September, when the money — and the argument — comes due again.