What Does the NO (on 410) Vote Really Mean?

A Sharing With Barbara Mayer

{Author’s Note} I originally agreed to write this Sedona SCENE – Sedona SOUL column with the intention of offering some kind of healing for all aspects and factions of the Sedona community. The word “heal” means “to make whole”, and as a woman who is following a dedicated spiritual path, I want to be a positive voice for all residents and visitors alike who love this city and who want to make her the best she can be – so that she in turn can provide her own magic of healing for all who have the privilege of experiencing the Sedona Soul.

I did support the Yes vote on the Prop 410 referendum because I truly believe local control is the only way Sedona can find its way through the challenging years ahead for our state and our country. No outsider or outside force can possibly understand the issues and workable solutions to any problems as well as those who live here year around and who have a sincere commitment to championing the best Sedona can be –never bowing to political or personal interests to the detriment of providing the kind of leadership a unique city like Sedona deserves.

Considering the results of the 410 election, if I can claim any kind of authenticity at all, I must confess that the first thing I must address is the issue of my own healing. That must come before I can pretend to offer healing to anyone else on this highly charged and deeply emotional issue which has occupied the Sedona Scene and Soul for the past few months. I’m working on it. I still believe in the people who live here and I will go to my grave defending the right to vote and choose what one feels is best for an issue or a community. I also know from my own contacts with voters and other sources that a good number of people –- not having understood the wording of the referendum — voted No on 410 because they thought NO meant No Lights. Nevertheless, their ballot helped the real fight which was for or against local control of the 89A corridor in West Sedona.

People voted on 410 because of their own reasons, and in the following column I hope to help analyze what has happened here, and what we might learn as individuals and as a community. Some of you will agree with me. Some of you will not. But when an issue like Prop 410 has taken up so much of the communal spirit, emotion and energy, it can be beneficial to try to understand what has happened. I write these words as a professional journalist, an interfaith minister and a concerned citizen of Sedona. So –the column…}

“Winning Elections The Easy Way”

One of the less desirable manuals for Winning Elections The Easy Way looks something like this: First, you find some issue which fits your own agenda and you make the people fear it more than death itself. Then you pound it and all its horrors home to potential voters

Secondly, you find any public servants you want to defeat and you make them responsible for that fear. So you do a thorough job of casting them as the villains and you proceed to assassinate their characters with vicious lies, malicious accusations and unbridled, mean-tempered personal attacks. You single them out as the ones who are making every aspect of your life miserable and you try to convince the voters that they must be defeated at all costs.

Next you tell the people your own champions are the heroes and heroines who will save everyone from the invented worst case scenarios you have now led all the people to believe.

If possible, you turn a supposedly unbiased little hometown newspaper into your own Public Relations machine, and then you use the sacred power of the press to pound your message home – with facts and fiction all jumbled and lost in the glowing halo of the printed word and under the usually respected titles of editor, mayor, or other usually trustworthy appellations

And lastly, you keep pounding fear, fear and more fear into every message you put out to the electorate. “Make them afraid enough and they’ll follow you anywhere”.

So — does that old recipe for winning elections work? Just ask Sedona observers who witnessed the recent Prop 410 referendum results. That technique from the Manual On Winning At All Costs not only works. Used well, it can sometimes bring about absolutely stunning results. Here, in summary, are the facts on what the people who voted NO on Prop 410 have brought to the City of Sedona:

At a time when cities and towns all over northern Arizona – such as Prescott, Williams and many others are taking back some of the ADOT highways to provide greater safety and walkability in their own civic living areas, Sedona voters overwhelmingly elected to deny their own city the right to provide greater vehicle and pedestrian safety measures on their own main street.

While cities all over America are passing laws to ensure more options to control traffic flow and provide viable, more community friendly streets, Sedona voters overwhelmingly chose to make sure none of those options will be available to their own city, its residents and its visitors. In fact, while other communities are striving to provide safer and more attractive streets for their citizens, the majority of Sedona voters, by voting No on Prop 410, chose overwhelmingly to preserve the ignominious “Suicide Lane” which runs most of the 4.8 miles of their own West Sedona main street.

Apparently ignoring the fact that Sedona’s tourist industry and the bed tax which it provides are the keys to keeping Sedona residents from paying NO property tax or higher city sales taxes, Sedonans still voted overwhelmingly to allow unnecessary continuous roadway lighting which will severely impact the dark skies which many visitors expect to enjoy when they choose to spend their tourist and vacation dollars in Sedona.

Also ignoring Sedona’s treasured reputation as a very special and unique gem of Southwestern ambiance and culture, by voting No to deny local control over SR 89A, Sedona’s own voters chose to allow future steps which will take away that very uniqueness and make the City of Sedona just another “Anywhere USA.”

In a city which contains a large number of retirees and senior citizens, as well as tourists who must jay walk to negotiate long stretches without safe crossings in West Sedona — if they even choose to visit there — Sedona voters made sure, by their vote, that their own children will still have to take their chances on exiting school busses and then trying to cross the five lane 89A traffic to get to their homes on the other side of the street. Some people will tell you that’s not true, but I have recently personally witnessed this fiasco several times while driving on 89A. Senior citizens and handicapped people will still also have to take their own risks to get across that street — because that’s the way the majority of Sedona voters want it.

By voting No on Prop 410 Sedona voters effectively made impossible any future improvements which local control of the 89A corridor could have made to attract more residents, visitors and businesses. This, of course, will ensure the continuing downward spiral of business income and viability in West Sedona.

So — the obvious question arises. Why did Sedona voters do this? What could possibly lead so many citizens to actually vote against their own and their city’s best interests by refusing to seize the opportunity to take local control of their own main street?

Were Sedona voters so easily convinced by made-up horror stories of endless metal barrier medians which they were told would stretch from one end of 89A to the other? Did they really think any responsible city government would install as many as eleven roundabouts when none were needed or actually viable for 89A? Did they really believe — against the solid facts provided about Sedona’s strong fiscal position — that the city couldn’t afford to own the road while it already pays for half of its maintenance and liability? How could so many voters accept unbridled, totally fabricated, fearful propaganda and fiction as absolute fact?

True, there is much fear in the country right now as the national and world economy flounders as the result of unbridled greed on the part of banks and people in financial power.

True, deep-set fear will always win over even the most overwhelmingly proven fact. And intimidating tactics used on businesses and individuals will help to increase that fear. That’s what the old manual advised, wasn’t it? Instill fear, fear, fear and more fear. Enough fear in enough voters will always win you an election …

And true, when people are afraid they often blame government, especially when the mood of the country is hostile and fearful and trusting no one.

Negative campaigning works best when people are afraid and vulnerable to any loud voice which can make fiction sound like fact — and which can substitute mistrust for the more reasonable faith in government which used to exist in America before the fear mongers and divisive, hateful separatists have split our nation and so many communities in two.

Emotion always beats the best evidence. Maybe that’s why Sedona citizens actually voted against their own best interest. Yet I do wish the No side of 410 could have gotten the great number of votes they did without resorting to the mean spiritedness and vicious, hateful character assassination some of them have employed. Those downright nasty tactics do not bode well for elections yet to come, and Sedona certainly deserves better than that.

So now this referendum election is done. SR89A will soon be torn up to begin the installation of 108 additional tall light poles because that, it seems, is what the great majority of our voters wanted. But there is another election waiting only a few months down the new overly lit road. Empowered now by their great victory on Prop 410, you can be sure the Old Guard powers that engineered such a thorough success on the referendum will be using the same intimidating and fearful tactics to fill the four open seats on the City Council with their candidates who will do the bidding of the real power people — who stay quietly submerged, hidden deep within the Sedona Scene — and who still want to lay claim to the Sedona Soul.

That next election will be here before you know it, and the observers will be watching with the same overwhelming questions: Will the Sedona voters again vote out of fear – or will they ask enough questions to get all the facts required to cast a true, informed vote?

In short, can the Sedona voters again be so easily had?

Stay tuned…

Barbara Mayer is an Inter/Faith Inter/Spiritual minister, author, teacher, and poet who resides in Sedona, Arizona.