Drip irrigation is not that great for trees that need to develop its root systems (to gather more water, and to survive monsoon winds in the Southwest).
If you do drip irrigation for such trees, at the minimum, the drip would need to be expanded as the canopy expands, and/or use deep watering spikes.
Better would be a deep mulch basin with intermittent deep watering.
In Phoenix (which is mentioned in the article), people have a tendency to use hybrid palo verde, trim the trees so they are more like the idealization of trees rather than the canopy pattern found in the wildland, and then have xeriscaping in a way that doesn't promote root growth. Some people will drip irrigate. The result are trees that blow down easily with the monsoon winds (which occasionally turn to hurricane strength gusts). It's not too hard to get chip drops during monsoon season because of poor stewardship.
In the nearby local park, there were a number of trees planted. That's good ... but the placement was not carefully chosen. Some of them will grow to shade the west setting sun along pathways, which is great. But there were other trees that were grown within the canopy of the overstory trees -- they are not going to grow great. They were also planted by digging large holes to fit them, but without any understanding of how rainfall will collect. Turf was added back (grasses compete with trees to fight over whether it turns into grassland or forest), rather than using mulch basins; the only reason they will do ok is because the park services flood irrigates the park. Lastly, the tree species chosen didn't look like they were carefully considered.
Mainly, the program looks like it has metrics on the number of trees planted, but there was nothing in the program or policies about tree species selection, planting methods, consideration of sunlight and rainfall patterns.