Adkins is a persistent advocate for improvement. The city recently created an online inventory of its trees — it has more than 92,000 — and Adkins has scattered tags on trees around town to document their environmental and economic value. He uses a formula developed by the U.S. Forest Service and arborist groups that factors in how much carbon a tree stores, how much electricity it saves, how much it reduces storm-water runoff and how much it offers in terms of aesthetic value.

“We went from being a palm-pruning, tree-pruning maintenance crew to where now we’re actually managing the entire urban forest and trying to move forward with shade percentages, increased canopy coverage and managing it more appropriately,” he said.

The shift has come as Phoenix tries to catch up with other cities in making the kind of urban environment to which young workers flock. But meeting the goal comes with more challenges here, including working collegially with a development community accustomed to paving what it wants to pave and not necessarily being told what it should plant. And then there is water, or the lack of it.