Text to speech audio articles made possible by CAST11 Talking Glass Media
This holiday season in Tempe is a time of light, warmth, and celebration — shining not just through our traditions like the Fantasy of Lights parade, tree and menorah lightings, and community gatherings, but through the incredible people who make our city feel like home. It’s your kindness, joy, and community spirit that truly illuminate our streets and bring our city to life. Together, it’s the heart of our neighbors and the connections we share that make this season — and Tempe itself — so bright.
I hope your New Year is filled with love, hope and the spirit of community.
Happy New Year.
In service,
Rosa Inchausti
Tempe City Manager
A Year of New Tastes and Shops … and More to Come in 2026
The soul of any community starts with its locally-owned restaurants and retail shops – those special places owned by people who might be your neighbors, who are passionate about their community, and care about their products.
Launching a small business like a restaurant is a lifelong dream for many people. In 2025, more than a dozen locally-owned restaurants opened in our city. And so many more have already announced their plans to open in 2026.
Opened in 2025
- Filthy Animal
- Drop Dead Gorgeous
- Prince Street Pizza
- Gio’s Coffee & Cafe
- Proof Bread
- Laymoon Cafe
- Cafe Zupas
- Last Rodeo Hat & Bootbarn
- Rite Ya Suh Jamaican Food
- Bad Jimmy’s
- Night Owl
- Wild Barbeque
- Hayden House Café
Coming in 2026
- Retail Therapy
- Glai Baan concept
- Phantom Fox Beer
- Goat & Ram Pizza
- Novel Ice Cream
- Roman God of Fire
- Carmen
- RePUBlic
- Casa Cantina
- Culinary Gangster
- Shawarmaati Mediterranean Grill
More to come!
New Opportunities – growing jobs and innovation in Tempe
We also added more than 2,500 new office and industrial jobs in our community this year, including the global headquarters for Cognite, the regional headquarters for Goosehead Insurance, and the headquarters for both LEGO and Dutch Bros. Looking for a job? You might want to apply at any of these new companies.
Opened in 2025
- Dutch Bros
- Cognite
- Kestra Financial
- Goosehead Insurance
- RoviSys
- Branded Bills
- LEGO
- Ecentria
- Whatnot
- AIDC
- Syenta
- Busch Vacuum
- Setna iO
- Quantum Computing, Inc
In the coming year, we expect to see additional large companies move to Tempe. Avnet’s corporate headquarters is moving to south Tempe and Synsus is opening here. Both will bring significant new investment to our community and jobs for our residents.
Guided By You – Priorities for a Stronger 2026
As we move into 2026, I wanted to share with you some of our priorities for the coming year. As City Manager, I feel it’s important to provide the best possible services for our businesses and residents.
In Tempe, we focus our goals where it truly matters — with you. Our priorities for 2026 are shaped by your feedback, your satisfaction with city services, and the shared vision we’ve built together through community engagement and performance‑based budgeting. The performance-based budgeting measures our successes and prioritizes what residents want most. This method is based on community satisfaction, progress on our performance measures, and our Council priorities:
- Safe and Secure Communities
- Strong Community Connections
- Quality of Life
- Sustainable Growth and Development
- Financial Stability and Vitality
We also accelerate five specific priorities each year with the intention of realizing a rapid, marked improvement for them. This year, the accelerated priorities include:
We are confident you will see broad improvements in our local businesses, our neighborhoods, the environment, and our community spaces as a result of our efforts. We’ll be monitoring progress and sharing the results with you.
Strengthening Our Community Safety
Everyone has the right to feel safe. Police Chief Ken McCoy, Interim Fire Chief Darrell Duty, our Community Services Director Craig Hayton and our Community Health and Human Services Director Tim Burch often work together to find ways to not only make our community safer, but to implement programs and solutions to make our parks, our streets and our public spaces feel secure.
Feeling safe is knowing that there are people who will be there for you in your worst moments. Our park rangers provide a reassuring presence in our parks and preserves. Our Tempe Fire Medical Rescue answered nearly 30,000 calls, showing up for people in need in a matter of minutes. When seconds count, they are there with the tools, the training and the technology needed to save lives. And our Care 7 crisis response team is there alongside them, offering a calm hand in times of trouble.
It’s important to me that we prioritize your safety, and we work proactively to ensure it. This year, we led the Valley in reducing violent crime. It went down by 21% in the first six months of 2025, and much of that can be attributed to work we’ve done in the last two years, including standing up the Real Time Operation Center, targeting street racing, and realigning police operations to be more focused and effective. And we heard you when you told us that safer streets were a concern by adding photo enforcement. Collisions in the intersections where it was implemented dropped by 20%.
This significant drop is our starting point for improving the feeling of safety for our parks and neighborhoods. We are continuing to build relationships between neighborhood residents and police officers, and will also work on the environmental changes we can make to improve safety in both parks and neighborhoods. Something as small as a street light in the right spot can make a real difference. If there is a way we can make you feel safer in your neighborhood, please reach out. We want to know.
Paving the Way for Safer Roads Throughout Tempe
Residents give us solid direction every year when they complete the Community Survey. Improving the quality of Tempe’s roads came up as a high priority again this year. Residents approved the funding to restore our roads in the last bond election, so we went to work. So far, we’ve repaved and repaired about 200 miles of roadways and we will ensure every road is up to excellent condition within four years.
In some cases, street paving will be done in tandem with a larger streetscape project, which aims to ensure better overall street safety and align with Tempe’s sustainability goals. These updates include bike lanes, left turn signals, sidewalk improvements and greater ADA accessibility.
If you’d like to see when your neighborhood roads are scheduled for repaving, you can search by address at tempe.gov/streets.
Reducing Homelessness and Creating Stability
In Tempe, our strength as a community has always come from the way we care for one another — especially our most vulnerable neighbors. You told us through the Community Survey that supporting people experiencing homelessness is a priority, and your compassion inspires our work every day. Together, we are building a city where everyone has access to the resources, dignity, and stability they deserve.
Tempe residents prioritized services for those experiencing homelessness in the last Community Survey. Our City Council also rated helping the unhoused as an area to be accelerated.
Point in Time Count data by Maricopa Association of Governments shows that the City of Tempe has reduced homelessness by 46% in the last three years. Our homeless outreach team helped more than 3,200 people resolve their housing situations.
We want homelessness to be rare, brief, and one time. We want people to be able to ask for and find help quickly. Our city has spent $140 million since 2022 to prevent and end homelessness – $55 million is dedicated this year alone. We will be opening new bridge shelter space and bringing new people to our Tempe Works programs, along with continuing our successful HOPE homeless outreach team, Care7 crisis response program, and more.
Restoring and Growing Our Tree Canopy
Trees are more than shade. They are sometimes beloved neighborhood landmarks. In the Oct. 13 microburst we lost more than 500 trees just in our city parks and right of ways. That doesn’t include the trees that were damaged in yards and at businesses. Losing so many community trees was devastating on an emotional level as well as an environmental one.
We are working to replenish the 500 plus trees lost in the storm and grow our canopy even further with a long-term goal of increasing Tempe’s tree and shade coverage across the city for a cooler, greener, and more resilient community. Our goal is to have 18% of our city covered by trees and shade to provide cooling and reduce water evaporation.
It will take time and some nurturing to restore our community trees, but the best time to start is now. Visit tempe.gov/UrbanForest for more information and, if you like, donate trees for our city.
Strengthening Business Support in Tempe
Our community has a strong history of business innovation. A healthy business environment not only provides jobs and services for residents, it ensures a robust economy and pays for quality of life amenities for everyone. I’ve enjoyed working alongside our businesses, helping them find pathways to success.
This year, we instituted a business license. This will help us fully identify the businesses in our community, discover new ways to assist them, and help them connect with each other for new opportunities.
2026, a Year of Shared Strength and New Beginnings
People are our first priority, and everything we do — from our goals to our programs and services — is focused on supporting the well‑being of those who live, work, and visit here.
This approach has served us well, as once again we have seen great results, such as in our 21% reduction in violent crime, 46% reduction in homelessness, and improvements to our streets and infrastructure.
Tempe has long been a place people choose for home, work, education, and fun because of our spirit of innovation, community connection, and genuine care for one another. As we step into 2026, our focus is to keep building on that foundation — making our city even more welcoming, supportive, and strong for everyone.
Read more stories from the Phoenix Area on Signals A Z.com.
