Letter to The Editor:
Sedona’s financial challenges are not
being met under Home Rule

@Jean Jenks,

Jean, you are unequivocally the smartest city budget and fiscal analyst in Sedona, including anyone on City Staff. I would hope that thinking voters heed your words and outcry. While I’m on the same page as you, please permit me to suggest another way to think about opposition to Home Rule. I think the voters just think of the Home Rule Option as a straight yes or no proposition. Not so, there is another alternative to Home Rule that hasn’t been disclosed to Sedona’s voters…and this neglect is by design.

The City’s Pamphlet entitled “FACTS on Home Rule,” as well as the proponents of the Home Rule advocacy argument and the City media outlet aka RRN’s editorial support for Home Rule, are typical examples of how government at all levels, as well as our own local Chamber, propagandize an issue. Relative to any given issue, they first give the reader/viewer an avalanche of official information that has absolutely no probative value, then they string together these useless facts into an apparently valid logic string, then they give you an official conclusion derived from a logical deductive leap. This is a fancy way of saying they employ marketing wordsmiths who take bogus information that is either false, exaggerated, or unrelated and craft it into a persuasive argument targeted at the unwary which is intended to lead them to believe that if they don’t accept the promoter’s conclusion, life as we know it on earth will quickly end. A good example of this is “If we don’t have a regime change in Iraq by overthrowing Saddam Hussein, then we will have Middle Eastern civil, religious and factional wars for years into the future.” Wrong premise leading to a conclusion of unintended consequences!

Moreover, voters must beware of the old shell game wherein what’s important is the information that isn’t disclosed by proponents of an issue. Proponent’s comments are excellent but still constitute a version of the old shell game. Think about this…

If Home Rule is not adopted by a majority of the qualified voters, the state-imposed expenditure limitation applies and no new home rule may be submitted to the voters for at least 2 years. Proponents, are you saying Sedona couldn’t wait just 2 years to learn how to control the never-ending expansion of non-critical project spending as it pays down its excessive $36 million in bonded debt and $4 million in City Hall mortgage debt while building up rainy-day reserves/Enterprise Funds? Are you implying that it is necessarily beyond Sedona’s management capability to develop non-tax revenues such as the immensely fiscally successful resort City of Palm Desert, CA?

There are options you didn’t mention other than just “yes or no” on Home Rule. In the alternative, the City of Sedona may submit to its voters a Permanent Base Adjustment (only) Option …something you failed to mention when you should have.

Permanent Base Adjustment does away with Home Rule. If Permanent Base Adjustment gets voter approval, the city no longer has to put Home Rule on the ballot every four years. The city can still determine its own spending limitation based on its revenue. It’s a good thing! The Home Rule Option prescribes the liberal CAFR Federal METHOD the municipality will use to calculate its own expenditure limitation each year whereas the Permanent Base Adjustment Option requires the use of a more conventional State statue prescribed accounting method . Several West Valley (Phoenix area) cities have already approved Permanent Base Adjustment and Sedona should applaud them. Permanent Base Adjustment does not raise taxes or allow the city to spend with no discretion. All it does is allow the city to spend the revenue it brings in predicated upon a base point at the time it is voted in. Of course, to do this would require the City to do a much better job of generating realistic revenue and expenditure estimates in light of real current economic conditions instead of imaginary absurd “never-ending good times” predictions. The Permanent Base Adjustment, as does the Home Rule Option, provides for an annual inflation rate adjustment of nearly 3 percent when the Federal government says inflation is running nearer 2%. Surely the City can live with that. Permanent Base Adjustment offers communities more flexibility in budgeting but makes it harder to adopt special interest group pet projects or no bid Chamber contracts or Staff, Chamber and Council beautification wish lists. In other words, if a city is to adopt a Permanent Adjusted Base Rate Option it had better do realistic budget forecast estimates.

Anyway, certain revenues are specifically excluded from the state-imposed expenditure limitation. For example, revenues received from the issuance of bonds, revenues received from interest or dividends and certain non-tax revenues, revenue from Federal grants, and intergovernmental revenue already subject to another entity’s expenditure limitation, are all exempt from the expenditure limit under either option. If the state-imposed limitation does not allow for the expenditure of sufficient local funds (less the exemptions listed above) then State law provides four options to potentially solve this problem, as follows.

• Alternative expenditure limitation (local Home Rule option)

• A permanent base adjustment without Home Rule Option

• A capital projects accumulation fund

• A one-time override

All of the options require voter approval. If none of the options are approved by the voters, the state-imposed limitation will apply.

Why don’t any of the local proponents of Home Rule digress to the media with an in-depth analysis of the advantages/disadvantages of these other alternatives?