Proposed New Ordinance Criminalizes and Greatly Restricts Aid and Even Food Distribution
City Parks Department to Ask the City Council to Tighten the Screws Even More
Back in December, we wrote about a troubling move by the City of Phoenix Parks Director Cynthia Aguilar to require permits for volunteer street medicine in parks. That policy (approved by the city council by an 8-1 vote) already made it harder to provide basic care to people experiencing homelessness.
Now, the new Parks Director Martin Whitfield wants the City Council to tighten the screws on humanitarian aid in parks even more – even to the point where the aid won’t even exist anymore.
The Phoenix Parks and Recreation Department has released a new draft ordinance that adds more restrictions. You can review the City’s proposal and background materials
On paper, this looks like a permitting system to regulate the provision of services in city parks. In practice, it looks like a shutdown strategy.
Taken together, these changes don’t just regulate care—they risk shutting it down.
What Street Medicine Does (Did)
The Street Medicine Phoenix program is a student-led, multi-university effort that brings care directly to people experiencing homelessness—meeting them where they are, including parks and encampments.
You can learn more about Phoenix Street Medicine here
They provide:
- Basic health screenings (blood pressure, blood sugar, A1c)
- Wound care and foot care
- Vaccines
- Mental health support
- Narcan to prevent overdose deaths
- Vision checks and glasses
- Help connecting people to clinics and services
This is frontline public health work. It fills gaps in the system and reaches people who often don’t access traditional care.
What the New Proposal Would Do
The new draft ordinance goes well beyond the earlier permit requirement. Based on the City’s proposal materials, it would:
- Make it a crime to provide basically any street medicine service or even food without a permit (Class 1 misdemeanor)
- Limit permits to just twice per month, per park
- Ban even food distribution without a permit (at least it wouldn’t be a crime to distribute water)
- Restrict services to hard surfaces (like parking lots—not grass)
- Require enclosed spaces (which generally aren’t available or accessible, and the city probably wouldn’t even let them put up a tent in the parking lot)
- Add complex, burdensome application requirements
You can read the full proposed new ordinance that will be voted on by the Council in May
It’s hard to look at this proposal and not see what’s driving it.
From my perspective, this looks like an effort to make life easier for Parks Department staff.
Public policy should be built around what works for the community, not what’s most convenient for the agency managing the space.
What You Can Do
The City says it wants public input but hasn’t made it easy to provide it yet. They say they ‘will open a survey for you to share your feedback’ but it’s not posted yet. There are two community meetings listed on the City’s site on April 8 and April 14.
You can also:
- Contact Phoenix City Council members
- Share your perspective with Parks and Recreation
- Help raise awareness about what’s at stake
Bottom Line
It’s reasonable to set basic rules to make sure activities in parks are safe, coordinated, and respectful of shared space. But that’s not what this proposal does.
There’s a big difference between good-faith regulation and creating a permitting process so restrictive that it effectively shuts down services altogether.
This proposal crosses that line.
Instead of supporting volunteers who are meeting urgent needs, it puts up barriers that will likely either stop that work entirely or make it so infrequent and limited that it loses its effectiveness.
That’s not balanced regulation.
And in this case, it comes at the expense of people who already have the least access to care.
