By Tim Perry
We at Small-Town Sedona urge Sedona residents to vote no on Proposition 400, reauthorization of home rule, and yes on Proposition 403, the Cultural Park Preservation Act, at the polls this coming Tuesday.
There really is only one issue in this election: The current Sedona city council and city staff think it’s absolutely fine to flush democracy down the toilet and impose their will on us because they, who hail from big cities sharing few of Sedona’s problems, think they know what’s best for us. And they’re absolutely indignant and outraged when we contradict that narrative.
When we told them, by 64 percent, not to put a homeless camp on the Cultural Park, they were disgusted with us. When we put the issue of blocking housing at the Cultural Park on the ballot, they sued us to try to deny us a voice—after certain councilors said over and over again that they wanted us to have a voice. When we told them emphatically we didn’t want a garage in Uptown, they built it anyway at an astronomical cost that they authorized while hypocritically wailing about it. Right now, we’re telling them by something in the range of 80 percent to 90 percent that we don’t want Uptown parking fees, parking permits, or employees kicked out to make room for tourists, and they’re going full steam ahead after all three objectives anyway. When we told them we didn’t want an OHV ban, they were going to steamroll right over us until the Goldwater Institute stopped them. When we told them by an enormous margin we didn’t want overpasses in Uptown, council’s direction to staff was to start planning for the “when” rather than the “whether” of those overpasses. And a quarter of a century ago, when we told them we didn’t want a four-lane interstate coming into town through the VOC, they were prepared to plow us into the dirt until residents organized and blocked that insane proposal.
The Sedona city council despises us, the residents of Sedona, and it’s high time we took away their arrogance, their power, and their ability to blow a hundred million dollars a year of our public funds on staff’s pet projects and diversion to special interest groups by voting no on home rule.
It’s very important to understand what home rule actually means, which city staff and council never bother to explain properly. Home rule means that you authorize, in advance, the council and staff to spend as much money as they want without having to come back to you for approval. In 2022, they used threats and manipulation to secure a yes vote on home rule. At that time, the budget was $48 million. Thanks to the home rule preauthorization, four years later, council was able to authorize a $106.3 million budget for the coming year—the largest in Sedona’s history and an astronomical leap beyond actual needs—without any approval of such a drastic increase from the voters.
Home rule means council and staff laughing up their sleeves as they continue to persuade us to vote against our own interests. A no vote on home rule cuts out the mechanism staff and council use to anti-democratically impose their wishes on the rest of us, who work in this town and make it function.
When home rule fails, society and governance do not come to a grinding halt in Sedona. We have three alternative options to fund our city government without handing over our brains and our gonads to the big-city outsiders who sit on council:
- Reversion to the state expenditure limit. Council and staff present this alternative as absolute disaster for Sedona. In reality, the current expenditure limit for the city is $31.7 million. That’s sufficient to fund every statutorily-required function of the city, including officials and the sewer plant, and everything that a clear majority of residents want to continue to see funded, including arts and culture, nonprofits, parks, the pool, and the police force. Across Sedona’s four-decade history, the size of the general fund budget, which covers all essential city functions, averaged just $14.5 million a year, and did not ever exceed the current state expenditure limit until the last few years. Seventy percent of Sedona’s budget throughout the course of its history has been spent on capital projects—staff building stuff for the sake of building stuff regardless of whether we need it or not, and mostly we don’t. The city could continue to operate just fine under the state expenditure limit, only without outside bureaucrats trying to overdevelop Sedona.
- Permanent base adjustment. Under permanent base adjustment, Sedona voters can authorize an alternative expenditure limit for the city by updating the previous voter-set limit. We could use this to authorize a city budget of, say $40 million, to allow for some minimal capital projects in addition to basic operations. Small-Town Sedona does not support a PBA amount that would be in excess of the city’s annual revenues, which are currently in the range of $68 million. We stand for a balanced budget—which means revenues cover expenses and excess cash gets banked against a rainy day. A PBA can be a good tool or a bad tool. It can be used to restrict municipal operations in a prudent fashion, or it can be set absurdly high to prevent city staff from having to come back to the voters for decades. One current council candidate expressed support for a PBA amount of $200 million, which would mean, unless staff decided to arbitrarily double the budget again, that they would not need to come back to us, the voters, for approval of their spending for likely another 20 or 30 years.
- Annual overrides. State law allows the city to put a proposed budget larger than the expenditure limit to the voters every year. Overrides are the most democratic method of authorizing the city budget, echoing the ancient Roman constitutional system of putting all legislation to the voters, and the method most likely to keep council and staff prudent in proposing budget amounts. If they propose something too big, they’ll know voters will reject it—and then they’ll be back to the state expenditure limit, which will be fine for the city but not for their egos.
What happens once we vote no on home rule?
The biggest and most important benefit of a no vote on home rule is that it revives democracy in Sedona. No more humbly waiting to hear how much staff and council plan to screw us for each year. We, the residents and voters of this town, will be involved at every stage in determining the budget total and priorities—because if council and staff disdain to put us first and propose another insanely bloated budget at the polls, we’ll throw it back in their faces and then recall them, and whoever is left will have to make some very unpleasant economies. That’s a check on council’s present unchecked spending that we desperately need.
For another thing, we can expect our taxes to go down. Now, we see those on the pro-bureaucracy ticket claiming all the time that a no on home rule doesn’t automatically lower taxes. Correct. Taxes are set separately by city council. But—if we’re no longer spending to the limit of our ability to tax, why would we leave the taxes high? Council and staff, working with special interests in town, have imposed two tax increases on both sales and bed tax in the last 15 years, raising the city component of our tax to 3.5%. If we get rid of home rule and cut the budget back to a reasonable number, we can slash both sales and bed taxes back to 3% or even 2.5%, which will not only put more money in our pockets, but give small businesses in this town a new lease on life in these hard economic times.
Alternatively, we can let the higher tax rate ride for a couple of decades, bank the extra income, then repeal all city taxes and run the city responsibly off its investment income. Or we could lobby the legislature to change the law so we can give tax rebates to residents—which would theoretically mean transferring tourist tax dollars to residents on an immediate and personal basis. Who’d like to not only get their sales taxes back each year, but with an additional two or three dollars per dollar paid on top?
Businesses will also stand to benefit from the absence of a staff of inspectors and officials with too much time on their hands, who run around Sedona making it more difficult for businesses to do business. The bureaucratic obstacles will vanish with the reduction of the bureaucracy and businesses will no longer be losing sales as they watch buyers turn away from the obscene tax rate. Plus, without having millions to spend on idle efforts, the city’s fake tourism promotion program, which is intended to drive visitors away from Sedona, will have to be shuttered, which means advertising from individual businesses will no longer be buried by city propaganda.
Without the bureaucracy, guess what else will happen? There won’t be enough city staff to enforce the absurd building and land codes that currently exist, so in order to save face and prevent universal defiance of the codes, the city will end up having to repeal most of the codes. That will mean we can finally get some housing built in Sedona—real housing for families, that they own themselves, not apartments that will keep them forever dependent on the developers and elites who have just happened to retire to Sedona. We may well end up with a by-right code allowing the construction of normal, small, traditional homes—homes naturally unsuited to becoming STRs—without any permits by their owners, which would mean an immense expansion of home ownership, which is what workers really want. And with LDC 2.6B repealed as part of the package, we could use our land effectively, without preferential treatment for the rich.
With the stereotyped council and staff out of the way, incidentally, we can start to work on efforts to rein in STRs that have nothing to do with compromising landowners’ property rights, but rather with reviving traditional rural methods of social shaming and nonviolent pressure to make large STRs in Sedona economically nonviable.
Without city staff continually meddling in social affairs, Sedona’s nonprofits will experience a resurgence of influence and importance. Forty years ago, before the city government existed, nonprofits effectively ran this town. They organized residents and raised funds to accomplish goals without any coercive government or taxation involved. As government is leaned down and bureaucracy eliminated, nonprofits can rebound to fill the space left behind. See Elinor Ostrom, Governing the Commons, for further details on this type of non-coercive social organization.
Are you aware that the current city council is planning to pour millions of your tax dollars, regardless of whether or not you support this move, into propping up the failing Sedona-Oak Creek School District? SOCSD is one of the worst-performing districts in the state and will likely fold in a few years without the financial support of the city, which in turn would lead to the creation of dozens of small, innovative, diverse schools in and around Sedona to make up for the loss. Students would benefit, and families would move to Sedona from all over the country to give their kids a Sedona-style education. The spirit of Verde Valley School’s founders would come back to us again.
A no vote on home rule will also mean the revival of the arts in Sedona. No longer will the parks department get to impose a policy of driving festivals away from Sedona; instead, the city will need the revenue those festivals bring, which will be outside the alternative expenditure limit, whatever that might be. The number-one obstacle to a strong performing arts scene in Sedona that residents and artists identify is the city’s noise ordinance, which only became a problem once there were enough city staff to enforce every whining complaint from a neighboring bigot and which will no longer be a problem once the bureaucracy goes away. Galleries will rebound without high taxes and crippling regulations. Costs will come down for artists with the increased availability of housing.
And let’s not forget one very important benefit of a no vote on home rule: it derails the agenda of the special interest groups that are currently working hand-in-glove with council and staff. As those who have been in Sedona long enough know, the home rule agenda is being pushed by a small group of professionals and hoteliers who don’t even live in Sedona, and the so-called Sedona Democracy Alliance.
This small group is attempting to work hand-in-hand with city government to control the marketing and representation of Sedona, micromanage resident and tourist behavior to conform to their ideological goals, direct the spending of public funds, and use city projects for personal financial benefit. There is a development agenda for the future Sedona in these people’s minds, and it’s one in which small businesses are replaced by corporate conglomerates, small buildings are replaced by strip malls, and houses are replaced by apartments.
A yes vote on home rule empowers the city council to continue maneuvering with its business allies to attack the traditional components of a small-town economy and the quality of life, casual and unregulated, that attracted so many of us to this small town in the first place. A no vote on home rule cuts out the special interests, the corporations, and the tourism marketing targeted at day trippers rather than arts enthusiasts. A no vote on home rule sets the stage for clearing away the red tape that blocks economic diversification, resiliency, and small business growth and prevents families from relocating to Sedona. A no vote on home rule will create the kind of opportunity and hope in Sedona that our town hasn’t seen for decades.
We also encourage Sedonans to vote no on home rule because such a vote supports a concurrent yes vote on Proposition 403, the Cultural Park Preservation Act. City council and staff have used every financial and managerial resource available to them to try to prevent the publicly-demanded reopening of the amphitheater, and without either a complete changeover of council—or a no vote on home rule—they will continue to do so, because they will have the resources to pursue their agenda.
Council and staff have every intention of demolishing the Cultural Park amphitheater to build even a small number of apartments for two reasons. One, they’re simply desperate to kill the venue. It’s important to understand that the visceral repulsion that Sedona’s officials have for music, dance, theatre, parties, celebrations, and fun has deep historical roots. The arts, particularly performing arts, have always been loci of opposition to hierarchy and authority, and generators of divergent and dangerous ideas, which is why government officials have always attempted to subvert or destroy the arts. Sedona is no different. Sedona’s officials realize, however dimly, that the revival of the Cultural Park as a community venue will create the opportunity for members of the community to organize themselves voluntarily and effectively as a body in such a way as to reduce the role and influence of government in the community, and that thought is like acid to them. The revival of arts and arts education in the community means the death of big government.
Sedona’s city council is currently bent on imposing an east-and-west-coast agenda in which apartments and density replace home ownership and small-scale, organic development. Their motivation is both ideological and political, tied in with their attempts to retain party dominance of Sedona: they want to create apartments in place of houses for its own sake, because they see such a transition as a “good thing,” and they hope that the individuals who will occupy those apartments, due to the demographic and financial criteria they will set for those apartments, will be people similar to themselves who will be likely to keep voting them back into office. In pursuit of that end, they are prepared to spend our tax dollars—which they have in abundance thanks to home rule—to buy up available land so they can control what’s built there and who lives there.
Contrary to the council’s narrative that destroying the Cultural Park for housing is a silver bullet that will “solve” housing in Sedona, there is no rational need to do so. Sedona has more than a thousand vacant lots that can be used for housing, as well as (not including the Dells, which should be developed for agriculture) numerous large parcels that are currently being misused, including a number owned by the city government. We could have put fifty cottages on the property they planned for Sunset Lofts years ago. Today it sits empty because the city has no intention of either building housing itself or allowing individuals to build housing. The supposed need for the Cultural Park to be repurposed as housing is a dishonest canard—especially once city staff confessed that 95% of whatever was built there would likely be market-rate housing anyway.
Quite frankly, and it’s necessary to say this, the performing arts are more important, more essential to human needs than housing. Creative, intelligent people will come to Sedona and do whatever it takes to scrape by just to be part of something as marvelous as the Cultural Park.
We at Small-Town Sedona see the Cultural Park restoration as being primarily for us, the residents. We plan to advocate, with regard to any deal that is brought forward for the park’s future, first and foremost for its retention by the city as a public park when not in use for events; preferential ticket pricing for residents; preferential booking for local and regional acts; and reservation of the amphitheater for public use on major holidays and significant public occasions. The Cultural Park isn’t for someone sitting in LA or Manhattan to make money off. The Cultural Park is for us, the community, to entertain us and to inspire us. With the amphitheater revived and the Sedona Film Festival operating at the park, the Cultural Park’s restoration will catalyze a new wave of community engagement with the arts in Sedona. We’ll get our theatre groups and chamber groups and orchestra back—all because they’ll have that goal to inspire them. Businesses will benefit from the summer boost of nighttime concerts. The public will benefit from the communal experience of enjoying music and drama together. Artists will get to perform on one of the greatest stages in the world. Everyone wins.
Decades ago, when Sedona’s population was 5,400, about 3,000 of them packed into Poco Diablo to hear Henry Mancini. Proportionally, today, we should be easily able to fill the Cultural Park bowl ourselves. If we can’t, there’s something very wrong with this community.
Beyond the joy and the financial benefits of reviving the amphitheater, there is a more profound potential awaiting us here. With the expected closure of SOCSD, and with Yavapai College having wanted desperately to get out of Sedona for decades, there is an opportunity for public benefactors to work with a chastened and no-longer-rich city council to arrange to reassemble both campuses with the Cultural Park in order to create Sedona’s very own art-focused college. This would tie in with both amphitheater and film festival operations at the park as well as creating a major form of economic diversification into both education and support structures for the park’s and college’s operations. It would reestablish Sedona’s identity as a city animated by the arts in a way no other action could achieve.
But none of these outcomes will happen without a no vote on home rule. If city officials have the money and staff to prevent these outcomes, they will do so.
It’s also important to note the strength of the hypocrisy currently being practiced with regard to the Cultural Park by certain factions within this community. At one point, the council was prepared to pitch for as many as 700 apartments in the Cultural Park in order to erase the amphitheater. Then they brought in a 400-something figure and were ready to compromise quite a lot on that—but no amphitheater. Now their allies are pushing a mere 100 units to replace the amphitheater, along with a bunch of other uses—when the Sedona Cultural Park 2.0 plans had proposed, years ago, 75 units plus all of the old arts and cultural functions, including the amphitheater. The desperation has become real, and it has only one goal: kill the amphitheater.
Then there’s the small detail that we hear, ad infinitum, from the Sedona city council about how much we need young people and families to move to Sedona and how much we need to see the median age come down. Agreed. In the Cultural Park survey, people in their 30s voted by 70 percent for the amphitheater over housing, and people in their 20s voted by 77 percent for the amphitheater. Young people don’t want to rent an apartment and wait on 70-somethings for minimum wage. They want to own a home and go to concerts at the Cultural Park. This council and staff are absolutely opposed to giving the young people whom they supposedly want what those people actually want.
Once upon a time, we could have supported a reasonable housing component as part of the Cultural Park revival. It would have been great to have young artists and families living there. Sedona could have done something ecologically, architecturally, and socially groundbreaking with a well-planned arts village at the park. But the Sedona city council has been so dishonest with their attempts to bulldoze and gerrymander the Cultural Park with the bare minimum of pretend public consultation that it has now become necessary both to punish the council and to take the decision out of their hands by banning housing at the park completely with a yes vote on Prop 403. Perhaps ten or twenty years from now, when the amphitheater and SIFF are thriving at the Cultural Park and a different spirit prevails in Sedona, we can revisit that decision. For now, it is necessary to exercise our democratic rights under the Arizona constitution to decree that the park shall be for us and for the arts, not for destruction by a developer.
A no vote on home rule ultimately means recognizing the strength of the rural, Western, and American tradition in which government is understood to be at best a necessary evil, our servant and not our master, and applying that principle to Sedona’s government, with immediately benefit to those who live in this town, particularly the young working population wanting to raise families here. It means recommitting to our identity as a city animated by the arts, not by hikers or mountain bikers. It means putting into practice at the municipal level the principles of frugality and responsibility that our parents drilled into us when we were kids.
Vote no on home rule, and yes on the Cultural Park Preservation Act, to keep Sedona a small town where we the people call the shots and call them in favor of efficiency and liberty.