By Cliff Hamilton
Sedona, AZ — Annexing almost 3,500 acres into our city limits brings a major new risk of setting off another round of Forest Service land trades in Sedona. This risk far eclipses the paper thin one of Cottonwood annexing more land toward Sedona or the petty squabble between some City staff and a few Yavapai County employees over building a bus repair facility at the wastewater plant. Based on the Council’s expressed reasons for pursuing annexation, it is akin to using a sledgehammer to swat a fly. Meanwhile the specter of unintended consequences rears its head.
“More land trades can never happen,” they say. “The local Ranger District opposes it because the Coconino Forest Plan opposes it.” However, a new set of circumstances are coalescing that threaten to override local decisions if the Council opens Pandora’s Box by annexation. Here’s how and why it happens:
First, annexation brings upwards of 3,000 acres of forest land with nice views, a classic Sedona address and the promise of city services inside new city limits. That gives the impression to developers and upper level federal decision-makers alike that the City wants to enlarge the size of Sedona. Much of west Sedona was created by Forest Service land trades. (That’s why we have Foothills South and Foothills North, North Slopes, Thunder Mountain etc. subdivisions.) Now imagine new Foothills West and West Slopes and Bear Mountain, etc, etc. developments in newly-expanded western Sedona city boundaries. Once this forest land comes inside city limits, wealthy developers with money to spend and political connections will begin salivating.
Next consider that today there are a larger than usual number of rural lands for sale throughout the western US. Many have good timber resources, grazing suitability, recreational attractions and watershed values. Some are private land inholdings surrounded by Forest Service land. These would be attractive to the Forest Service for acquisition if offered in trade for arid, low resource-value forest lands west of Sedona’s current city limits. This above-average land inventory for sale in the western US is also a new phenomenon. Heirs of long established ranch businesses increasingly do not want to be ranchers, to live out on rural land, to eke out a living that way or to raise families away from modern convenience, entertainment, social contact and consumer products. And so the family ranch the kids don’t want to inherit goes up for sale when parents get too old to manage it. Yes, this has been happening in rural communities for a long time. But now there is a larger wave of it happening, creating a bigger than usual inventory of attractive properties available for potential trade.
Then add a new national administration coming into power in a few weeks. This new group has little concern for tradition, precedent or established norms. Land trade clauses in forest plans will be easily ignored in a new resource-exploitive political climate. New resource and land management appointees will be pressed to “drill baby drill,” extract, exploit and develop federal lands and resources like never before by orders from the new upper administration.
And so a new set of factors come together, putting Sedona at risk of being changed forever by the unintended consequences of annexation. This is happening only to address some petty bickering with Yavapai County and a remote concern of more Cottonwood expansion. These expressed reasons for annexation are not reasons at all but naked excuses for continuing distrust and spite of our neighboring governments. The bickering with Yavapai County over building a bus repair facility at the wastewater plant could readily be settled by a court and the City is never going to develop land at the sewer plant for public facilities of any kind regardless of whose zoning rules apply.
Sedona’s obligation to provide city services to new residential subdivisions will be expensive. Because we have no city property tax to defray those costs, added expense of things like more city staff, police and wastewater treatment will have to be carried by existing sources. The demand and cost for water will inevitably rise as our supply dwindles in our warming and drying climate. This will be on top of the 48 percent water cost increase our City’s primary water provider is already planning to cover current demand and upgrade aging infrastructure. And Sedona’s traffic problems are already legendary. Expanding our city size by another 30 percent with the same road structure will only make them worse.
Of course, the Council could control some of the development via zoning restrictions. Time and again over the years, however, those controls have vanished in favor of a developer’s proposal when the right kind of legal bribery is provided in the form of “community benefits.” Zoning restrictions are not assured to last, not even as long as the Council that created them. Future Councils are not bound at all by any assurances given the community by a previous Council.
Beyond the risk of starting up land trade activity again and the unintended consequences it brings, the City Council is justifying its annexation proposal to get around Yavapai County’s resistance to the City building a bus repair facility at the wastewater plant and to supposedly prevent Cottonwood from ever annexing land that includes all or part of that area. The concern about Cottonwood annexation is based on a notion that the city may someday want to “develop” land they call the “Dells” currently being used for effluent disposal. But what would the City want to actually develop on that land?
More than a decade ago the Council explored the question of developing low-cost housing, athletic fields or an entertainment venue there. Those options all came up as bad or infeasible for a number of reasons. Beyond those reasons, however, a more overriding reality emerged. The Arizona Department of Transportation (ADOT) made it clear that Hwy. 89A in that area is a divided, four-lane, 65 MPH freeway. It was unsafe to allow highway access for anything that could put dozens to perhaps hundreds of cars at once trying to enter the highway, sometimes at night, heading for Sedona or trying to cross over two lanes of high speed traffic and head toward Cottonwood. The Council’s reason for annexation to protect the land for future “development” is bogus. It’s never going to happen, regardless of who owns, zones or claims control of the land.
Then there is the irony of the whole thing. If an annexation to protect Council authority to develop the land starts up the land trade and subdivision development cycle again, it inevitably results in more sewer connections and a greater effluent volume to be disbursed each day. This will force the City to use all the available land (and probably wish for more) to dispose of the greater effluent volume leaving no land available for the “development” that annexation was supposed to protect – even if ADOT would allow highway access.
Protecting land for “development” is an excuse for annexation, not a reason. That leaves only the dispute with Yavapai County to justify a huge annexation and the risks that go with it. Forget the annexation. It’s time for the Council to take the Yavapai County contract dispute to a judge or arbitrator, get a ruling, and build or move on to other City options.
In the end, the risk to Sedona of more land trades and their impacts is not justified simply to alleviate a squabble among bureaucrats about a building. Our City Council has lost its perspective on annexation along with most of any reason for doing so. They are trying to swat a fly with a sledgehammer and the unintended consequences could be far worse.
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1 Comment
Cliff, makes as much sense as a lame duck council spending $10 million and borrowing $13 million to buy the Cultural Park.