Community Summary
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Improve existing and create new community and neighborhood spaces
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Redefine “neighborhood” through neighborhood connections
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Foster neighborhood and town-wide gatherings through a community calendar
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Stabilize our population through the attraction and retention of families
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Promote the 10-year intentional plan to provide affordable housing, “starter homes” and create an affordable home cycle
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Continue fighting to limit or otherwise control Short-Term Rentals
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Continue to work towards improving open and honest dialogue between residents, council and staff
Community Places and Spaces
Today, Sedona has three large parks: Sunset, Posse Grounds and Ranger Station. There are four "pocket" or neighborhood parks: Greyback, Pinon, Jack Jameson Memorial Park and the Sedona Military Service Park. Then there is the Wetlands, which is also drying beds for the Wastewater Plant and the Jordan Historical Park where the Sedona Historical Museum resides. Of these, Posse Grounds has the most facilities: the Hub for classes, meetings and indoor community events, such as Breakfast with Santa. And let's not forget the Pavillion Stage host to the Red Dirt Concerts, dog park, pool, disc golf course, work out trail, pickleball courts, community space behind the courts, tennis courts and a recycling center outpost with the community compost area. However, many festivals like the Wine Festival, Mountain Biking festival, Food Truck Festival have outgrown the park. Further, the Red Dirt concerts are so popular there are now overflow crowds. The pool, which is rented from the school district will need a major overall in a few years - after all it is over 50 years old.
All of this to say using a good portion of the Western Gateway to create a new festival area, a larger community space to just sit and watch the world (and stars) go by and a recreation center with a new indoor pool, maybe a rock-climbing wall, classrooms, exercise space, or whatever we imagine since there are no plans just imagination at this point. All of this seems like high community value - spaces mostly for us.
And with a new larger festival ground, we have an opportunity to add more community festivals like a community picnic, art shows, dancing under the stars, a music festival, a taste of Sedona, again whatever we can imagine. And of course, the Sedona International Film Festival new buildings will be up on the Gateway as well, providing movies and possibly a new stage for our local performing arts groups.
Beyond the large spaces, we also have small spaces in the neighborhood pocket parks. We should review the land we own and determine if some of it has the best community use as a small pocket park giving space for neighbors to gather without having to go to the larger parks, which could well be on the other side of town. I see this as part of the resilience and sustainability efforts in our Community Plan. As we add more pocket parks, perhaps we should also use them as a way to stay connected as neighborhoods by choosing to take on some of the gardens or artwork in our local neighborhood park.
There is also a cross-over here between Community and Environment as we have authorized the purchase of reasonably priced land within the city limits on Oak Creek. Conserving the Creek and the riparian eco-system is important for our community and these parcels may well be suited to the creation of new creek side parks allowing us to enjoy the creek and prevent destroying of the creek.
We already have a lot of activities going on in the community, from slam poetry competitions to live music sponsored by various places to events to sports to things for kids to do. So, before we know what else we are going to add, let's start with something that was mentioned often during our first Community Conversation: creation of an online, and perhaps even app based, community calendar showing what's happening, where and when and how to get there or to reserve space if that is a requirement too.
Housing
According to the initial data used for the balance housing report, almost 92% of households are either one or two individuals without children. This is not surprising when the median age is 64.1 and around 48% of individuals are over 65. Around 18% of our housing stock is some form of short-term rental and of the remaining 82% some number of homes are owned by individuals who primarily live outside of Sedona. The implication is if we don't do something our community will eventually devolve to a resort and wealthy retirement community. This goes against my vision of a Sedona that is vibrant, innovative, artistic and thriving with young families, entrepreneurs, artists and seniors.
The Balanced Housing strategy proposed recognizes that the community could not realistically handle the amount of housing needed to support all of the current workforce requirements, let alone adding in an expanding medical facility, without changing the character of the town, first. It also recognizes that not everyone wants to live here, even if they work here. However, it is also noted that there are a good number of people already living here who are cost burdened, meaning paying more than 30% of their income on housing + utilities. These working families are the backbone of stable and thriving community.
The housing plan proposed by the Community Development department is a 10-year slow growth plan, wherein 600 units of housing are added for working age households and 175 units of income restricted Sedona Senior households. The targets set by this program include:
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Stabilizing and increasing student enrollment in Sedona schools by 50%
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Increasing the percentage of population below age 65 to 60%
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Increasing the percentage of critical employees (first responders, healthcare professionals, educators) living in our community to 32%
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Reducing the number of cost burdened seniors by 35%
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Reducing the percentage of cost burdened essential workers (retail, hospitality) by 25%
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Reducing the number of commuters from 80% to 70%
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Ensuring half the units for working age households includes ownership
Some thoughts on the last point might be to put some of the city owned land suitable for housing into a land trust. The land trust would prevent homes from becoming STRs, would allow ownership of a "starter" home and ensure the home could not be resold above a known and fixed percentage of equity. Over time, the owners of these starter homes would acquire more wealth and be able to afford moving into a larger home in Sedona, thus perpetuating the cycle of new home ownership for another working age family.
Having a solid community conversation around housing has been happening for years. We need to start making progress on a future Sedona with working age families as a vibrant part of that future.
Along with working on how to get more housing stock into the hands of working families and cost burdened seniors, we need to continue to work with our lobbyists and other communities feeling the negative impact of short-term rentals to get the Arizona legislature to provide some relief to the law they passed that has created this problem.
Finally, the Dells. As long as I have owned a home here (2010), I have heard people in the community say that housing should be at the Dells. For those who don't know, the Dells is 200 acres across from the wetlands or the wastewater treatment plant on 89A. You can often see the effluent water from the sprayers shooting water into the air (and some grazing cows). Prior to annexation in 2025, the Dells were part of the County, even though the land was owned by the city. To me, this presented the following issues: first, anyone living out there would have no say in the politics of Sedona but be living on Sedona land and; second, building would have to be according to the county land use and building codes and not to those of Sedona.
Once the land was annexed, there were multiple steps required before we could build out there:
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Determine whether 20 years of spraying non-A+ water, along with 10 years of A+ water requires soil remediation so we don't create "Love Canal - Sedona Edition".
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Determine whether all of the water being sprayed onto the land has made the land unbuildable geologically
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Build injection wells to place the effluent into the soil to eventually run into the underlying aquifers. Projected to take about 3 years
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Secure the injection wells as they are part of Sedona's critical infrastructure
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Remove the piping in the front 100 acres, leaving the back 100 acres in piping for additional wastewater removal
Oh, and the Arizona Water Company informed council in that same meeting where approval was granted to build the injection wells that there is currently no potable water available for that site. So perhaps point 0 is that AWC needs to determine whether there is a suitable well that can provide water out there.
The council directed staff to do what was necessary for 1 and 2 above and the report indicated no remediation was necessary and the land was buildable geologically.
To me, this means that as soon as AWC confirms there is sufficient water to support use of land and there is a site map available indicating where the secured wells will be and therefore where there will be available land, council can direct staff to start the work on a master plan (what the community wants to see out there, any rezoning that will need to happen, what a master plan might look like, etc.) Everything we went through to try to get a master plan for the Western Gateway.
Neighborhoods
Our neighborhoods aren't what they used to be. Many of us live in areas surrounded by Short-Term Rentals (STR) so our neighbors, whom we used to know by name and who looked out for us as we looked out for them, now change every week or weekend. Or the house sits empty when it can't get rented.
Until we can get some local control over the location and/or number of STRs through state legislation, we must work to find another way to redefine and celebrate our "neighborhoods". Taking the notion of celebrating our neighborhoods, we should find a way to include in the Parks and Recreation budget an amount to be used to host an annual block party or block event. Perhaps this should be part of the resiliency work from the Sustainability team. It's an idea to explore.
As of the 2020 City Council retreat, Council has requested neighborhood connections be reevaluated with the primary focus on neighborhoods with single points of ingress and egress. This reevaluation has been on hold because the FY24 (2023) showed that residents were not interested in pursuing street connections being made between neighborhoods. The biggest concern was around strangers driving through the neighborhood. I think we can almost all agree that unless you are in a gated neighborhood that does not allow STRs, we all have strangers not only driving through our neighborhoods but also living in them. Creating new street connections between neighborhoods allows us to expand our concept of neighbors and perhaps find more permanent residents with whom we can build connections.
Further, when FEMA changed Sedona wildfire assessment many of us discovered our homeowner's insurance rates took a steep upwards climb. Some people even lost their homeowner's insurance. While some in our community might be able to rebuild from scratch without having insurance, most of us cannot. Further, insurance is required if you have a mortgage.
While working with neighbors who had lost their insurance or were finding the steep rise unaffordable, I discovered that one of the reasons used for raising insurance was not just the close proximity of the forest to your home nor even whether the property was Firewise but whether there was only one point of entry/exit to the home from a major roadway. Many of us live in older neighborhoods that have only one such entry/exit point, me included. The argument is if fire management is trying to get in and people are trying to get out on the same road heading in opposite directions, either people or first responders will be unsuccessful leaving your home and property even more at risk.
Creating new neighborhood connections allowing residents a different way out from first responders during an evacuation emergency may also help reduce insurance costs and increase available options. Even if insurance companies like their new rates, we will live in safer neighborhoods allowing for better evacuation.
Conversations
When I ran for office in 2022, I had holding town halls as one of the items I wanted to do. However, the City Manager at that time informed me that Town Halls were not practical: required too many staff members, was too unfocused and council members needed to agree to same. Instead, I set up Office Hours at the Community Library Sedona. For two hours, twice a week, I sat at the library and was available for any community member to come and speak with me about anything. I advertised in the library newsletter, social media and through the city roundup. After 2.5 years and very few people coming to speak with me, I gave the room back to the library.
During the last council priority setting, it was agreed council would hold Community Conversations every other month on specific topics. We held our first one on "what do seniors and families want and need" on April 29, 2026 at the Community Library Sedona. It was well attended and a lot of great ideas were forthcoming. Though a recreation center was a central idea throughout the sessions. I look forward to the next session.
I have always been open to conversations and willing to meet or chat via phone or zoom anytime. There are many voices with different needs, wants and opinions in our community. I try to understand them all and place them into the context of the impact on a future Sedona.
To repeat the quote from Mary Parker Follett (an early social scientist):
"Unity, not uniformity, must be our aim. We attain unity only through variety. Differences must be integrated, not annihilated, not absorbed"
or as restated by Renee Lawson
"Unity is not uniformity; it’s the art of weaving differences into a single strong fabric."