'This Week' Transcript 7-23-23: Gov. Jay Inslee, Mayor Grace Elena Garner & Rep. Michael McCaul

Interview

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You know, for lifelong residents like me, this isn't unusual. But what is unusual is that duration, as you said. And what we see is that we have workers who are outside every day doing gardening, working on AC repair, and then, of course, are unhoused. And those populations are really getting the brunt of this impact. If they're not able to be inside during our hottest hours, it really impacts their health.

We do see our firefighters attending to more heat-related incidents. And we see more heat related incidents at our hospital. We're lucky to have a level 1 trauma center and we do robust education in our community. But it still is really important for people to stay inside.

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We have three cooling centers that are open seven days a week and they're open throughout the summer. So, any time anyone would experience a blackout, they have a place to go. But we're also in very close communication with the electric company in our area to make sure that we're addressing these concerns.

They were just at a council meeting a couple of weeks ago, and we're having a power talk with our -- the electric company and our residents on August 1st, to make sure we're addressing issues. And we're really putting pressure on them to make sure that they're upgrading the infrastructure as often as possible so that we don't have blackouts at all.

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Correct. Well, we have 400 people who are experiencing homelessness in some way, but not all of those people are living outside at this time. They might be living in friends' homes or with family members. But what we're working on is opening up a navigation center that would have 80 beds for transitional housing as well as another 50 shelter spaces, and we're working as hard as we can to get that open very quickly.

But we also make sure to partner with other shelters within the area and with the Riverside County to get people into housing as quickly as possible.

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We absolutely need more support. We are seeing the impacts of climate change, and, you know, as I said for me, this temperature is something that I'm used to. I'm a lifelong resident.

What I'm concerned about is the rest of the country, the rest of the world who is experiencing this extreme heat for the very first time. When your body isn't used to these high temperatures, it can go into a shock. So if we don't act now, if we don't make sure that we're putting in the re -- putting in the actions that we need to reduce the impacts of climate change, we are just going to see this get worse and worse.

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In the short-term, I would love to see us put more funding towards electric vehicles, towards walking and biking paths, toward more shade. We're doing that in Palm Springs. We're adding shade to our playgrounds. We're working on shaded paths, walking paths in our city.

We want people to be able to be protected even when they are outside, and those are really quick short-term solution.

But we also need more money for housing. You know, again, if people are outside -- living outside because they have no place to go, that's a huge problem and we don't have enough money to build housing as rapidly as we need to, and there's a lot of roadblocks even when we do have the funds. So anything that we can do to make sure that people are having safe places to live is of vital importance.

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