Election Buzzwords, Checked: Separating Fact from Fiction

By Jean-Christophe Buillet, Sedona City Council Candidate

Sedona, AZ — Sedona residents have been hearing a consistent set of claims this election season: the city’s finances are sound, its big projects are successes, Home Rule is a simple, low-stakes formality, and the fight over the Cultural Park’s future is just politics as usual.

Those stories have been repeated often enough that they’re starting to sound like settled fact. They aren’t. When you put the talking points from the city, from its critics, from both sides of the Prop 403 fight, next to the city’s own audits, budget documents, court filings, and council meeting records, a different picture emerges: one of borrowed money, ballooning project costs, broken promises on process, and language chosen to make things sound better than the record supports. Here’s what the record actually shows, claim by claim.

“Home Rule simply allows the city to spend what it takes in.”

This framing is misleading. The 2025 budget was $103,291,695 while total revenues were $70,695,425, a gap of over $32 million. A “balanced budget” under Arizona law means sources equal uses, but sources can include reserves and debt proceeds, not just current-year revenue. The city has consistently budgeted tens of millions beyond what it actually takes in each year. If Home Rule were simply about spending what the city collects, almost nobody would oppose it.

“Since 2022, the city has put away $58 million in savings, paying off bills early and building a cushion for tough times.”

The audits tell a different story. From FY2022 to FY2025, spendable governmental fund balances grew by just $1.9 million, not $58 million. Meanwhile, total outstanding debt increased by $9.2 million, with bonds alone up $16.9 million. The city isn’t building a cushion; it’s borrowing more while reserves stay flat. The $58 million figure appears to conflate growth in total net position (much of it locked up in capital assets like roads and buildings) with actual spendable savings. Those are very different things.

“Every ten years, all Arizona cities are required to create a community plan that reflects the will of the people.”

This omits a critical fact. Sedona residents did not vote on the 2024 community plan and likely won’t vote on the next one either, because the city’s population has fallen below the 10,000-resident threshold required for a public vote. The plan was approved by City Council alone, not by residents. Calling it a reflection of “the will of the people” when the people had no vote on it is a stretch.

“For thirteen years running, Sedona’s financial management has earned the Government Finance Officers Association’s top budgeting award.”

The GFOA Distinguished Budget Presentation Award is a communications award. It recognizes how clearly and accessibly a budget document is written and formatted, and it is explicitly not an audit or a financial health certification. Winning it 13 years running tells you Sedona produces a well-designed document. It says nothing about whether the city is growing its debt, drawing down reserves, or spending beyond its annual revenues, all of which the actual audits show.

“The city eventually listened, separated from the Chamber, and created its own destination marketing organization.”

The city didn’t listen to residents on the Chamber relationship, the Chamber walked away. After the city slashed its funding by a third and withheld an estimated $8 million in bed tax money the Chamber was entitled to spend on tourism promotion, the Sedona Chamber of Commerce and Tourism Bureau Board voted unanimously not to renew its contract with the city. Even the original 2019 restructuring wasn’t driven by resident feedback; the city changed course to eliminate a potential violation of the Arizona constitution’s gift clause. That’s not a city responding to its residents, that’s a city that got legally cornered and then defunded a partner until it quit.

On the parking garage: “The contract was procured through a Construction Manager at Risk (CMAR) process, a recognized competitive procurement method.”

CMAR is a recognized method for procurement but calling it competitive requires some explanation. Under CMAR, the contractor is selected based on qualifications, not price. The price is negotiated afterward, directly between the city and the chosen contractor, with no competing bids on construction cost. The result: a $17.5 million construction contract and $26 million in total public funds for 270 parking spaces, roughly $92,500 per space, compared to a cited average at time of passing from WGI of $26,274 per space in Phoenix in 2023. “Recognized” doesn’t mean the public got a competitive price. It means the city picked a contractor and then accepted whatever number came back.

On The Shuttle: “The shuttle removes 350,000 car trips from our roads every year.”

The city’s own data doesn’t support this number. In fiscal year 2025, the system recorded more than 358,000 boardings, which the Transit Administrator said removed roughly 129,000 vehicle trips, less than half the figure being cited. And even that 129,000 figure assumes most riders would otherwise have driven alone, which ignores couples, families, and groups sharing vehicles which is more of the norm in a tourist destination.

On Forest Road: “The city has also completed the Forest Road Extension… It may not be pretty yet, but it works.”

It does work, but praising it as a success story while leaving out the cost tells only half the story. The project was originally estimated at $9.1 million. According to the Sedona Public Works Department, the final cost was $17.6 million as of April 2025, nearly double the original estimate for less than 2,000 feet of road. And that figure doesn’t even include what the city paid to acquire the land. Several property owners refused the city’s initial offers, forcing eminent domain lawsuits in Coconino County Superior Court and in every case that settled, the city ended up paying roughly double what it had originally offered. That’s a separate bill that never shows up in the project’s published cost figure.

On the Parking Garage: “By the time the final construction contract was approved unanimously by the City Council in May 2024… it was not a rushed one.”

Unanimous sounds like confidence. It wasn’t. Council members spent six hours discussing the garage and how much they disliked the price tag. One member suggested parking fees “should be $4 an hour.” Another said, “I think we’ve been very fiscally conservative.” A third, explaining her concern about sacrificing other priorities to the garage, said: “It’s not about $6 million. That’s peanuts. That’s money we have anyway. We always have $6 million.” A 7-0 vote after six hours of visible frustration isn’t a ringing endorsement, it’s a council that felt locked in after years of sunk costs and didn’t feel it had a way out. That’s a very different thing from unanimously believing the project was the right call. Six months before that vote, council had laid out specific conditions for approval of a garage including a plan for employee parking, parking guidance technology, consolidation of existing lots, restrictions on non-resident street parking, and a user-fee funding model. None of it was. Staff told council at the May meeting they hadn’t gotten to any of it and would hand it off to a parking coordinator who hadn’t been hired yet. Council approved the contract anyway and those considerations were put off to the last minute and are still being hashed out now, years after approval.

On the PBA timeline.

A Permanent Base Adjustment can only go before voters at a regularly scheduled municipal election, which means July 2028, not 2027. But that single error has been used to argue the entire alternative plan is fatally flawed, a conclusion the law doesn’t support. Two temporary override elections are legally available and would bridge the gap. The claimed $80,000 in additional election costs doesn’t hold up either, since the 2028 PBA vote would piggyback on the regular municipal election at no extra cost. Turning a correctable procedural error into a catastrophic plan failure is itself a form of misdirection. A Permanent Base Adjustment wouldn’t foreclose Home Rule as a future option; voters could still choose it again later if they wanted. What a PBA removes is the recurring uncertainty of relitigating this fight every four years voting on the same all-or-nothing, feast-or-famine choice again and again.

On Proposition 403: “It weakens the system that protects our community.”

That’s the warning being made about Prop 403, that letting residents decide the Cultural Park’s future by ballot bypasses the professional deliberation it deserves. Sedona voters already made this exact decision by initiative once before. In 1996, residents voted on Proposition 400, a referendum on the city’s own decision for the property and residents decided the cultural park would be an amphitheater and arts site. Nobody called that vote improper at the time. It’s the same property, the same process, and largely the same question. This time, the city tried to stop the vote, council hired an outside law firm, Herrera Arellano LLP, to fight it, and on May 6, a judge ruled against the city, leaving Prop 403 on the ballot anyway. The city didn’t just risk a costly legal challenge over this measure, it started one, lost on the merits, and then spent more time weighing an appeal before finally deciding to let it go. Community involvement and voting on issues strengthen a community, they don’t weaken the system that protects it.

None of this requires assuming bad faith from anyone. These are complicated issues, and it’s easy for a flattering number or a reassuring line to survive a few retellings longer than it should.

But Sedona residents are smart and they deserve better than generalities. They deserve the actual figures, sourced and checked against the audits, council minutes, news record, and public records, not talking points polished for a meeting or to make things look better than they are.

That’s what I’ve tried to do here. The documents I used as sources are public, and anyone can go read them. I’d rather residents see the real numbers and decide for themselves than take anyone’s word for it, including mine.