Henderson giving away free trees to help residents beat the heat
Henderson is the latest city in the Las Vegas Valley to announce a tree giveaway to help its residents beat the heat.
The first 100 residents of the Pittman neighborhood who show up to Wells Park on Saturday will be gifted a drought-resistant tree and a bag of potting soil in celebration of Arbor Day, a yearly international holiday encouraging the planting of trees.
Congresswoman Dina Titus, D-Nev., will join Henderson Councilwoman Monica Larson and Assistant City Manager Angela Summers at the event hosted with Nevada Plants, a local nonprofit.
The trees are paid for by the Inflation Reduction Act, a 2022 federal law that represented the largest federal investment in mitigating climate change in U.S. history. Star Nursery is donating 100 bags of soil, as well.
The Pittman neighborhood is east of Boulder Highway, with most homes falling within a triangle between Galleria Road and Warm Springs Road. It encompasses the Henderson Bird Viewing Preserve, the city’s wastewater treatment facility, Hinman Elementary School and the Henderson north police station.
Before it was absorbed into Henderson in 1953, Pittman had been an unincorporated community since the 1930s, largely housing workers at the nearby Three Kids Mine and Basic Magnesium Inc. plant.
Trees are in high demand in Southern Nevada because of increasingly hot summers that aren’t felt equally across every neighborhood. Last year brought the region its hottest summer on record. The National Weather Service began recording Las Vegas area climate conditions in 1937.
Due to what’s known as the urban heat island effect, neighborhoods such as Pittman with less trees or green spaces feel those temperatures more intensely than others.
According to the Regional Transportation Commission’s Southern Nevada Urban Heat Mapping Project that measured the heat island effect across the valley in 2022, the Pittman neighborhood is among those that extreme heat hits the hardest each summer.
The event will run from 10 a.m. to noon on Saturday at Henderson’s Wells Park, located at 1640 Price St. Trees are first come, first served.
Contact Alan Halaly at ahalaly@reviewjournal.com. Follow @AlanHalaly on X.
