By Mark TenBroek
Sedona, Arizona – Over the past year we have been hearing from local businesses and the Sedona Chamber anecdotal evidence that the economic conditions in town are dire. We have been told that local businesses are failing and that the Sedona Chamber needs to spend more on “Destination Marketing” to bring more visitors to town.
Since the City Council did not authorize the Sedona Chamber to spend on Destination Marketing, some businesses in town have begun raising money outside of the Chamber to advertise on their own to bring more visitors to town.
A long term view of business growth
The City Finance Department publishes a report each month that shows the tax revenue for the past two years and compares it to the same month from last year and the projected budget for both sales and bed taxes. These monthly comparisons give little context on where the local economy has been and more importantly where it may be heading.
The following chart uses these total taxable and bed tax revenues to calculate the sales in these two areas for the past 9-1/2 years. This chart shows a 12-month moving total for the economy so that monthly variations are removed and annual trends can be visualized. The red dashed lines show the national inflation rate over this same period.
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6 Comments
You can ride around Sedona in a flatbed truck showing off your charts Mark, but they are not going convince businesses in town that things are peachy keen economy wise.
Try talking to the business owners in person and ask them how things are going instead of promulgating and parroting city-created charts.
And you make it sound like the city is in imminent danger of a massive gridlock of epic proportions if it does not chase away visitors or road block them at Cottonwood to keep them from infesting Sedona.
It’s obvious you are a numbers guy and numbers don’t lie but context is what this is all about. This summer is a total bummer for the businesses in town that define Sedona. And it’s only going to get worse.
You are feeding the city council the manure it needs to justify strangling the business community in our town and getting re-elected.
Mary Ann, thanks for reading the article. By discussing topics as a community it helps make it better for everyone. I do agree that I am a numbers guy. The data in the charts I prepared are from ADOR and the US government sites so I believe that they are trustworthy. These are not simply City prepared charts.
I have presented the data as trends which is different from how the City provides this information. I believe longer term trends allow a better understanding of how things are going as opposed to simply comparing a month to the same month in a prior year. I do not believe in using anecdotal data to develop actions.
I would agree that the summer business is down – as it is every summer. It gets hot in Arizona in the summer and it is very difficult for visitors to want to come when Phoenix just had 31 days of 110 degrees or more. It is sort of like saying business is down in the Snow Bowl this summer when that is to be expected.
One last note. The City includes both businesses and residents. City Council has a responsibility to work to meet the needs of both – in a way that both do well. I do think that the Mayor and City Council have been thoughtful on the issues of tourism and resident concerns and I hope they continue to dig in on these topics.
You’ve got it backwards, businesses don’t define Sedona, the natural beauty of the red rocks and Oak Creek Canyon define Sedona.
Pave Sedona and you just have more desert. You may have noticed there is no shortage of desert in the southwest. Eliminate every business within 20 miles of uptown and the rare beauty of Sedona would remain.
Balance and preservation should be key. Not commerce and the almighty dollar.
Without tourist and a healthy, business community, you will start paying for property tax to the city which you dont do now. Tourist pay 78% of all city budget items….It is not a simple solution, but think things through, and dont cut your nose off despite your face!………..Just like life its all about balance!
Dave, I wanted to clarify that the estimate that visitors pay about 78% of sales and bed tax revenue is about right based on my calculations. However, when considering the entire City of Sedona budget, there are other sources of revenue, many of which are state shared revenue that depend on the number of residents in Sedona, not visitation. Taking that into account, visitors pay about 65% and the remaining 35% of the City annual budget is attributable to the residents of our fair city.
I would also point out that on an annual average, about 15,000 visitors are in Sedona each day, obviously concentrated over the Spring and Fall periods. So this means that we act more like a community of 25,000 people and require a City staff to support that.
Of note, about 75% of weekday traffic and 84% of weekend traffic is from visitors (shown in the draft Uptown parking study).
It is also important to remember that much of the visitor based sales and bed taxes are used to mitigate the issues that they cause; including the need for parking, the need for a larger police force, emergency services, improvements to the transportation network, the provision of a transit system, and several other components of City Government that may not be needed if there was not the current level of visitation.
I think it is important that visitation is fairly taxed to fund these necessary services that would not be needed if tourism was not such a dominant force in our community.
An finally, it is also true that there are also increased costs that residents pay in a tourist town for goods and services such as food and restaurants. And as Tony pointed out in the prior response, balance and preservation of the unique elements of Sedona is very important to keeping our community a livable and beautiful community. It is not about maximizing profit and continued growth.
@ West Sedona Dave
No need ever for city property tax. There are two other solutions, cut city spending, or eliminate the city. Both could not possibly do any more damage than having a city of Sedona has.
If you look at how much city spending has gone up in the last 15 years versus the increase in Sedona population, you can see clearly the the city is driven by the tourist pressure. Cut tourist expenses, cut taxes, cut city expenditure. Win, win, win.