By Sedona City Council Member Pete Furman
Sedona, AZ — I have been on the Sedona City Council since 2022, and I know that budgeting is a very complex process in Sedona. I believe a well-structured city budget is essential to keep city services running at optimal levels while continuing to help fund the library, the recycling center, and many other community-serving nonprofits. Setting the budget involves every city department, staff, the city manager, the finance director, the council, the mayor, a citizens’ budget committee, and several public hearings. It takes many months to complete. And many say it’s a mind-numbing experience.
The process we follow is enabled by Home Rule. Full disclosure: I am a proponent of Home Rule, but this is not pro v con piece, it’s just an analysis of what might be. As always, I’m speaking only for myself, not for the Council or city staff.
In my view, Home Rule is a mechanism whereby the voters grant the city the privilege of setting an upper bound on spending through its annual budget process. One aspect that I believe makes Home Rule the best tool is that it requires voter renewal on a four-year cycle. This requires the city to justify its past performance and demonstrate an ongoing commitment to good fiscal stewardship, with the voters serving as judges.
Opponents of Home Rule, often unhappy with various spending or policy decisions spanning years, launch efforts to end it. I understand they want a reset – to apply pressure to projects and policies and to enforce a level of fiscal discipline they think is lost.
When these arguments occur, some voices insist that voting Home Rule down doesn’t have to affect the city’s nonprofits or the things residents love, like our parks and the community pool – that we can live within the state-set spending limit. They insist the city uses scare tactics to encourage voters to renew Home Rule.
While it’s true that Council could choose differently, there are laws and mandates from the state that require a city to provide certain things. If money is left over after the mandates, community amenities and nonprofits can be funded. But if Home Rule is voted down and the city is forced under what’s called the state-imposed expenditure limit, there is very little money to work with.
I wanted to put those claims to a test: is it possible to create a budget that funds the nonprofits and keeps the city running at satisfactory levels if Home Rule were defeated? I called it the Skinny Chicken budget. So I spent my Fourth of July weekend, armed with Sedona’s FY2026-27 adopted budget and an AI assistant (Claude), to see what I could do.
Spoiler: it took three tries – and the version that technically complies has bad news – we had to cut the police department by 72%.
To be clear: I don’t support any of these budgets. This was a personal exercise to test what’s actually possible – I’m speaking only for myself, not the Council or city staff. It’s also a ‘wounded duck’, because its likely we’ll all start talking about a one-time budget override and/or a PBA if Home Rule fails.
The full analysis, with every number sourced from city documents, is on my website: https://sedonapete.com/2026/07/05/1759/