Anyone who watched last night’s Surprise City Council meeting learned something important: this council is fully capable of taking a chemical hazard seriously. The careful questions, the methodical concern, the genuine appetite for caution—it was all there. They simply aimed it at the wrong hazard.
The agenda item was zoning and safety buffers for Battery Energy Storage Systems. For much of the evening, the council worked through it with real diligence — discussing and asking thoughtful questions of experts and city employees about plume studies, evacuation planning, and catastrophic failure. Councilmember Nick Haney captured the spirit of it in a single line:
“We’re trying to plan for a worst case scenario.”
On its own terms, that is exactly the kind of responsible governance residents want, especially given the 2019 APS explosion that severely injured four firefighters. There is just one inconvenient fact: not one of those battery facilities currently exists in Surprise. The council devoted an evening to meticulous worst-case planning for a hazard that isn’t a current reality.
And here is the irony residents are not likely to miss. The worst case scenario already has a Surprise address. Just a few miles from city hall, on Sweetwater Avenue, sits a real threat — an ICE Prison Camp across the street from a chemical storage facility whose own federally required risk plan documents a hazard so serious that the Arizona Attorney General has already taken DHS to court over it. It is not a PowerPoint projection on a chamber screen — the building is real, the chemical hazard next door is real now, and the danger is on the public record. Yet it has received nothing close to the care the council lavished last night on a battery plant no one has built.
That contrast should put a certain excuse to rest for good. For months, the mayor and council have told residents their hands are tied and that the ICE facility is a federal matter beyond their reach. No one who watched last night can believe that anymore. You cannot spend an evening rigorously vetting chemical-hazard scenarios and then claim you lack the tools to do the same for a facility a few miles away. And on the parts that matter most — emergency response, evacuation, the safety of the children who attend school inside the hazard zone — the authority already belongs entirely to the City of Surprise. No federal-supremacy argument touches any of it.
So the silence on Sweetwater is not a limitation. It is a decision about where to point the city’s attention. And after last night, it is a shameless one.
One councilman did the right thing.
Last night was not all silence. Councilman Patrick Duffy requested a severity report on what a catastrophic event at the Rinchem facility would mean for this community — exactly the kind of analysis residents are asking for. The room applauded, because it is the obvious and necessary question. And yet the council took no immediate action, leaving the report to wait until members return from summer break.
The council’s response was dismissive negligence: one councilman asked for the truth, and the body chose to put it off. In a single moment, that is the choice this council keeps making, and the cost of that delay falls on the families who live in the hazard zone every day until the council bothers to reconvene.
Thank Councilman Duffy and ask for more.
Councilman Duffy deserves our gratitude and our follow-through. If you live in Surprise, call him at 623-222-1323. Thank him for asking the question no one else on the dais would, and ask him to bring it back as a public hearing agenda item the moment the council returns — so the severity report gets a genuine public airing instead of a quiet shelf.
The council showed us last night that it knows how to plan for the worst. One of its own members even asked it to. The only question left is whether the rest will follow.