Five years ago, the Labor Day Fires killed 11 people and destroyed more than 4,000 homes, becoming the deadliest and destructive wildfire season in the state’s history. Since then, the city of Phoenix has focused on rebuilding, including housing, rebuilding Blue Heron Park and building a new food truck lot known as the Phoodery. Eric Swanson is the city manager of Phoenix. He joins us to share more on what rebuilding has looked like.
Note: The following transcript was transcribed digitally and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.
Dave Miller: From the Gert Boyle Studio at OPB, this is Think Out Loud. I’m Dave Miller. Five years ago, the Labor Day Fires killed 11 people and destroyed more than 4,000 homes throughout western Oregon. They are part of the deadliest and most destructive wildfire season in Oregon history. We’re going to spend the rest of today’s show talking about recovery and rebuilding five years on. Eric Swanson is the city manager of Phoenix, which was hit particularly hard. He joins us now. Welcome to the show.
Eric Swanson: Good afternoon. Glad to be here.
Miller: So you came to Phoenix, came back to Phoenix after a brief stint earlier there, as city manager in 2020, first as the interim manager and then the permanent city manager in August of 2020. So just weeks before the Almeda Fire. What do you most remember about those days looking back?
Swanson: Well, obviously, you’ve mentioned before, there was significant destruction in the community. I’ve had a lot of experience in city government in general. I’ve had hurricane response, tornado response, but I would just say wildfire response – the one we experienced here in Phoenix – was none other than I’d ever experienced. And the closest I can get to that feeling of seeing total devastation was as a member of the military. I was deployed to Iraq and saw what total devastation looks like and air quality, all the things that go along with these types of incidents is so very overwhelming, but the good news is that Phoenix out of the ashes. We’re coming back strong, stronger than ever, and that’s because of the community resilience here.
Miller: Can you remind us how many homes and businesses in Phoenix alone were lost?
Swanson: 1,500. So to put it in place, we kind of sit in between Medford – Medford is to the north, Talent is to the south – and then you have a lot of Jackson County unincorporated areas. And we’ve increased the number of buildings that are affected – commercial, residential, multi-family – by doing some annexation, so I think when you add in the areas that we’ve annexed and then that 1,800, we’re getting pretty close to the total amount of devastation, which I think was like around 3,800 homes and businesses that were lost that day.
Miller: What have the biggest challenges in rebuilding been?
Swanson: Well, I think there could have been challenges that we were able to overcome. People wanted to rebuild in the community, especially residential, the folks that had insurance, those kinds of things. But there were others that had less means – elderly populations, lower income populations, agricultural workers – that obviously didn’t have the resources to rebuild, and that had a significant impact on the school system because they lost a lot of students because of the fire.
Miller: What do you think has worked?
Swanson: What I think has worked, like anything else when you look at these kinds of challenges, you look around and you find people that want to partner with you to help rebuild the community. We’ve been really blessed in that way, everywhere from local, private contributions to state, federal contributions. In total, we’ve been able to secure over $35 million in grants to rebuild our infrastructure and getting ourselves ready for the next disaster. So, I think reaching across those areas and people are generally speaking and what we found is they were really ready to chip in and help out and that still is evident today.
Miller: How do your total housing units now compare to what you had pre-fire?
Swanson: Well, fortunately, yeah, as far as the single family, like I said, family homes we’re back to pre-fire levels. Multi-family, the same way. Where we lag is commercial and our commercial downtown, and then also the trailer-type housing type of development, and those have not come back very quickly. We lost some pretty large mobile home parks in the fire and those are kind of lagging in terms of rebuilding. But we’re working with the state and we’ve secured funding or developers have secured funding to provide for additional residential. So I think when it’s all said and done, you’ll probably see our community close to double in population once all this buildup occurs. There seems to be a lot of interest in the downtown. We’ve had a business called the Phoodery, which is an eatery that has five different places, restaurants and a taphouse. So it’s coming back and you see it and just the positivity that the region has for Phoenix.
Miller: In the rest of this hour, we’re going to have more conversations that look specifically into the challenges of rebuilding after the destruction of mobile home parks or other sort of naturally occurring affordable housing. So we’ll hear more about that, but I was struck by the number you just mentioned that you could have eventually doubled the number of residents there, but listening to everything you’ve said, the sense I get is, even if you have more total residents, the overall makeup may be wealthier as opposed to low income. Is that a likely outcome of this fire?
Swanson: You know, absolutely it is. And again, having experienced other disasters, not obviously of this scale, but it always seems like it impacts the elderly and the low income more significantly. And there are programs that we’re trying to bring people back in, but we’re already five years down the road and a lot of those folks have made arrangements somewhere else. And as I said, the impact on the school systems, all those things are still part of the recovery effort and working together on how we can hopefully move forward on some of those gaps in the lower income, and as I said, we’ve had some projects that will do that. But you can’t necessarily draw a line between those folks that were impacted five years ago and and the people that are obviously looking for affordable housing today.
Miller: What do you see as the differences in the way Phoenix and Talent have approached rebuilding?
Swanson: I can’t really say much for Talent. I know they’ve had a lot of similar type projects. Again, I go back to the amount of money that we’ve been able to obtain, over $35 million in grants. We went to the legislature and asked specifically for funding for the new police, fire, and City Hall, which is all in one building, a 20,000-square foot building. We were able to get two appropriations from the state legislature to make that happen.
And then along the way, we’ve also applied for and received infrastructure grants – a new reservoir, for instance, a 2 million-gallon reservoir tank – which will double our stored water supply. Those are the things that we’ve done.
Like I said before, we annexed 600 acres, which again will impact our population, but also will provide a location of 300 acres which would allow for employment housing or employment lands that’s looking to create an area that we can work with our partners to provide some kind of campus-like development for employers and employees to go to. So there’s been a lot of things that have happened. We took over a water system that was pretty much financially defunct in the northern part of Phoenix, which was approved by their voters. So there have been a lot of things that because of where we’re at and the opportunities we had, we took advantage of, I think, maybe it is a difference between us and Talent.
Miller: You were pretty clear about the challenges for lower income residents and how many of them have just moved away because they didn’t see any other housing options there. But you also said, and the reasons for that seems clear, whether people are uninsured or or underinsured, the slow return for business in a commercial district or a downtown is a little bit less clear to me. What are the reasons for the slowness there?
Swanson: Well, I think from some of the businesses that were lost, I think some of the business owners just kind of felt like, do I want to go through this again? Do I want to rebuild or should I just go ahead and try to sell and get out of whatever business they were into, and I think for the most part, that’s what has happened. So, we have a tool, the city has a tool – Urban Renewal – that we utilize to encourage and provide some sort of either subsidy or some kind of way of getting commercial redevelopment in that area. And I mentioned the Phoodery before. That’s probably a $5 million investment that was made by a developer with the assistance of Urban Renewal funds.
So anyway, it’s slowly but surely coming back, and I think when it’s all said and done, it’s going to really provide for a downtown that you can see, that it’s visible, it’s identifiable, and I think that’s what any small town like Phoenix wants is a vibrant downtown, and we’re really focused on that.
Miller: Do you feel like Phoenix now is more ready for a fire than it was in 2020?
Swanson: Well, I get that question asked a lot. and if you look at what happened, on that day, September 8th, and all the factors that were part of that event, we lost three people in total, in all the communities, so I think that’s really a positive for our emergency responders getting people out, evacuated, and some pretty obviously fast moving 40 mile an hour southern winds. I mean, I think we did a heck of a job, but are we just as ready or better ready? I think absolutely so. I think people looked at their housing and how they’ve built and made sure there’s that fire safe area around their house. I think those are the kind of things that we’re seeing more and more of in terms of having experienced that. I mean, obviously something like that has a huge impact on how you look at the world, and I think that you’ve seen a lot of that.
The new, like as I mentioned before, a new public safety center has an emergency operations center that we built into the project, which was important to us. We didn’t have that kind of capability in the previous event. And it’s also become a hub for training for our police officers regionally that are able to use that for this type of planning for their jobs, getting that kind of background in terms of training in the jobs that they do, not only in emergency response, but just in general. And we have a lot of other agencies that use that same space for that purpose. So given all those considerations, I’ll give it a yes. I’ll answer yes to that question.
Miller: Eric, thanks very much.
Swanson: You’re welcome. My pleasure.
Miller: Eric Swanson is the Phoenix city manager.
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