My name is Jason, and I'm part of the Civic Engagement Team at Change.org. Our mission is to connect petition supporters with decision makers and to help foster healthy civic engagement in our communities.

We reached out to local officials to share the petition and get a response. Below is the response we received from the Office of Councilwoman Anna Hernandez:

Councilwoman Hernandez has been clear and on record with where she stands in relation to this Ordinance: in fact, she was the sole vote against it, recognizing that the Ordinance, as written, does not resolve the true challenges we face:

"Where we are truly going to solve this issue is when we have enough permanent housing, enough transitional housing, enough shelter beds for every single of our residents that is out there struggling,"  Hernandez said. ABC 15

“This ordinance still only moves the problem. It doesn’t truly resolve the issue that is coming out of communities and different neighborhoods around our parks,” Hernandez said. AZ Family

Councilwoman Hernandez knows that caring for people should not be a crime and encourages the community to take action against this ordinance.

City Council will vote on this Parks Ordinance on May 6th at 2:30pm. Folks can sign up to speak 2 hours prior to the meeting. 

From Councilwoman's latest newsletter:

I’ve said this before, and I’ll say it again: we will not solve homelessness, addiction and mental and health crises by limiting care. We solve it by investing in permanent housing, transitional housing, and the services people actually need to survive and stabilize. And we solve it by uplifting the mutual aid and harm reduction work already happening across our communities… care that continues to show up where our Phoenix systems have not.

Policies like this ordinance do not address the reality that people are being forced to survive in public spaces. Instead, they turn a blind eye to human need and criminalize it. Rather than building a city that listens to medical professionals, we continue to divert Phoenix police officers from other priorities to do work they are not trained to handle.

This violent and inhumane ordinance will only create more distance between people and the care that keeps them alive. In a city like Phoenix, as we head into a scorching summer that continues to break extreme heat records—and in a region defined by one of the largest urban heat islands in the country—that distance will cost lives.

Phoenix cannot continue down a path where the deaths of unsheltered people are treated as inevitable and where our public spaces resemble systems of punishment rather than places of refuge and care.

Care should never be treated like a criminal act. Feeding people should never be treated like a crime. And showing up for one another should never be determined illegal.

I hope this helps; we extend our gratitude to those who helped found this petition and those who support it.

The Office of Councilwoman Anna Hernandez