Mayor Gallego discusses President Biden’s infrastructure package

Phoenix Mayor Kate Gallego is in Washington, D.C., where earlier today, she joined a select group of mayors for a meeting with President Biden to discuss the president’s 1.2-trillion dollar infrastructure package that includes 600-billion dollars of new spending. We spoke with Mayor Gallego not long after the meeting.

We asked Gallego what they discussed at the meeting.

“I spoke about Phoenix’s needs as the fastest growing city in the country and how we want to partner with the administration,” Gallego said. “We have skin in the game we’re investing in our water system, our transpiration system, we want the people in our community bill to get to work more easily, to get to school.”

She explained that the administration is excited to partner with us and they are hopeful the bill will move next week.

We asked what might be the most important when it comes to Phoenix infrastructure.

She explained that we need an all of the solution that includes everything, not just one category.

“Maricopa has a bipartisanship plan but we have to get moving on it and we need partnership,” Gallego said.

Gallego believes that our congressional delegation understands the importance of this and she plans to meet with them tomorrow to cover more of how they can get these plans moving forward.

We asked if Arizona might see an Amtrak soon.

“There is a proposal in this bill that could help us move forward on that high speed rail system,” Gallego said.

Finally we asked if these changes will be coming in the near future.

“People are counting on the city and the national government to make sure that they can do their daily business, they wanna be able to get to school, to work, to have that clean drinking water,” Gallego said. “This really means a lot to the average resident in Phoenix.”