Next Door: Common Themes

By Steve Segner–

Sedona, AZ — If you spend much time reading posts on Nextdoor, you begin to notice a recurring theme. According to many commenters, every city council is either corrupt or incompetent. They don’t listen to “the public.” Every contract is overpriced, unnecessary, or over budget. Every new project is labeled a “Taj Mahal”—too expensive, poorly designed, and poorly engineered. City staff is described as lazy or inept, and supposedly, they, not the elected council, are really running the government.

I think you get the picture.

Before we critique every city decision, let’s clarify a few key facts about Sedona and ground our conversation in reality.

1. Sedona is a tourism-based city. The majority of the city’s revenue comes from taxes on visitors and tourism-related businesses, rather than from local residents.

2. Sedona is financially stable. The city usually generates more revenue than it spends each year and maintains strong reserve funds for stability and emergencies.

3. Sedona is not a “small town.” While the permanent population is relatively modest, Sedona functions much more like a small city because of the enormous number of visitors it serves. On many weekends, more than 30,000 people are in town, and the city supports more than 100 restaurants, along with hundreds of hotels, shops, tour companies, and other businesses. The infrastructure, public safety, transportation, and services required to support that level of activity are far more complex than those of a typical small town. 3. Sedona is guided by the public input in the form of the community plan.

4. Sedona has and will always have “Traffic,” but it has made a huge commitment to public transit and hwy realignments to soften the impact of the two-lane hwy meeting at the edge of town.

5. People may not know , but much of the traffic is a direct result of the community’s decision not to listen to the ADOT, the state hwy  commission, and push through a one-lane highway, not the two lanes recommended by the state engineers.

The city has a long-range plan for housing, traffic, transportation, and fire safety. This all takes money, and we are lucky we have it, Sedona, thanks to our vibrant tourist economy. The real trouble with Sedona is it has become gentrified, with the loss of over 1,000 homes to short-term renters and the influx of out-of-state retirees. Sedona is now going through a realignment , and the newcomers who visit Sedona before moving here, as well as the locals, want housing closer to their jobs.

The community plan has taken all this into account, and the city council is implementing the necessary steps to meet the community’s needs and wants. Next Door seems to be the place for negative input. The wall of Sedona. where every purposeful action by the city or staff is second-guessed.

Many on Next Door are all “Past their use-by date.” They used to be important and now find themselves in retirement with no direct reports. Let’s let the city council do their job, and let’s listen to ur city manager and staff recommendation before we go half-cocked on social media and complain.

The job of the City council is not to listen to the public; we gave them our permission to vote on our behalf when we elected them. Let them do their job, but by all means let them know how you feel, but don’t expect them to do what you ask. Sedona has many voices: 9,000 residents, 10,000 employees and owners, and thousands of visitors, all of whom are citizens. Living in Sedona offers no special privileges under state law, and the council must look out for the health and safety of all its constituents.