Pete Furman

Council settles with RD Olson to end Heritage Lodge suit – Sedona Red Rock News

The Sedona City Council voted 5-2 on Tuesday, Dec. 10, to reverse its June 25 reversal of the Planning and Zoning Commission’s unanimous approval of Oak Creek Heritage Lodge hotel project on the grounds that it did not satisfy environmental and planning requirements.

The council reversed itself in order to enter into a settlement agreement with property owner RD Olson Development, which sued the city in Yavapai County Superior Court on July 24 for “effectuating [sic] a zoning decision in the context of an administrative appeal,” abusing its discretion and acting in an arbitrary and capricious manner by overturning the commission’s approval.

Prior to the council’s acceptance of the settlement agreement, oral arguments in the suit had been scheduled for Wednesday, Jan. 15.

Under the terms of the agreement, RD Olson will break up the southern cluster of buildings into a larger number of smaller buildings, reduce the extent to which balconies overhang the floodway on the property, increase the number of parking spaces from 90 to 118, set limits on the number of event attendees and non-guest customers and contribute $550,000 toward the city’s proposed creekwalk or pedestrian bridge adjoining the resort property.

The contribution will not be due until the city fully funds the creekwalk plan, the cost of which is estimated by city staff as being $5.5 million.

The City Council’s renewed interest in a creekwalk will be covered in the Dec. 25 edition of the Sedona Red Rock News.

In exchange for these concessions, the council agreed to reverse its previous finding and approve RD Olson’s development review, allowing the project to proceed, and to exempt the Heritage Lodge from the increased development fees that the council voted to approve later during the meeting.

The development fee increase will also be covered in the Dec. 25 edition of the NEWS.

“We’ve received a number of comments alleging that the city does not have authority to change course at this point and that it just has to accept the outcome of the litigation,” City Attorney Kurt Christianson told the council. “The City Council has both inherent authority and express authority to settle this litigation. City Council, just like all litigants, has authority to enter into settlement agreements.”

“No new traffic study was done,” Christianson said in response to a question from Councilman Brian Fultz. “It’s anticipated to be the same, or slightly less with the restrictions on the guests.”

Public Comment

Members of the public came down 10- to-4 in support of the settlement agreement during the hearing.

“It disturbs me that we have to have an attorney and an attorney and an attorney to present developments,” neighbor Jake Weber said, and recommended having either more lawyers or fewer lawyers on the council. “This will help the budget. This is a long-term tourist that stays with us.”

“I ask that you consider this to be a future classic addition to Sedona, because it will be one that we can all be very proud of,” Fred Shinn said.

“I am totally in support of this stellar development,” neighbor Terri Frankel said. “Planning and Zoning got it right … Robert Olson and his team have since polished the diamond.”

“The Olson development is a quality development,” neighbor Mary Kyllo said. “His development will be an asset to my neighborhood.”

“I am absolutely, completely and totally opposed to the scale of Mr. Oslon’s resort,” neighbor Miriam Wackerly said, and predicted that the creekwalk would have “horrible negative effects.”

“You want to open up an area to, what, we have 6, 8, 10 million visitors per year?” Wackerly asked. According to the city’s latest tourism study, the city received an estimated 3,160,322 visits in 2022 and averages 1.39 million unique visitors.

“They’re going to be walking basically in our backyard … It’ll end up a toilet because people will go in Oak Creek. If they have that access, they will … It’s insanity … during COVID, the ducks left, the eagles left, the animals left,” Wackerly said.

“This is a new application. The developer doesn’t want to go through the process again. He wants to steamroll through City Code,” Timothy LaSota said. “The vote was the vote, it was final, and that was it … your code requires you to stick with that decision or approve a new application.” LaSota also urged that arbitrary and capricious arguments are “practically impossible for anyone to win against the government.”

“You guys are trying to erode, with this plan, both sides of the creek,” Michelle Thomas said. “Who’s going to stop people from going in the water?”

“When a guest stays at a fine resort like this, that’s one less house being rented,” Al Comello said.

“Going through this whole process, I just kind of wonder, what is the point of doing it if we’re just going to be met with lawsuits and then not get anything out of it,” said Lauren Thomas, who had initiated one of the appeals of the commission’s decision and was personally sued by RD Olson as a result. “Inviting more people to come to our private area — it’s wrong.”

Councilwoman Melissa Dunn said that she was “cognizant of the compromises that have been made with the settlement” but was still not comfortable that the traffic issues previously raised by members of council had not been resolved.

“When I voted to overturn the P&Z decision, it was expecting that we would arrive at a point of a settlement negotiation,” Fultz said before echoing Dunn’s sentiments on traffic.

“The reality is, it was zoned. The hotel rooms are less than what could be built there … the Olsons have tried to work with us,” Vice Mayor Holli Ploog said. “I appreciate that we have to compromise in this world … I’m very very conflicted but I’m also very practical.”

“Sedona needs a new resort like I need a new hairbrush, but that’s not the standard,” said Councilman Derek Pfaff, who is bald. “As much as I would like to find an excuse to say no, I’m hard-pressed to figure that.”

“The best would be to leave it virgin land,” Mayor Scott Jablow said.

During the council’s previous hearing on the resort, architect Stephen Thompson told council that the land in question had been under cultivation for 1,200 years.

Jablow then added that the proposed revisions to the resort “solved the issues I had with it.”

The council voted 5-2 to approve the settlement agreement, with Fultz and Dunn opposed.

The yellow-billed cuckoo, which had been referenced by several of the appellants as a reason to overturn the P&Z vote, who suggested the area was cuckoo habitat, was not mentioned.

Council votes 6-1 to proceed with annexation – Sedona Red Rock News

Sedona City Councilman Pete Furman said he was trying not to use the word “sprawl,” but he did eventually use it during the Sedona City Council’s discussion on Tuesday, Dec. 10, of annexing 3,422 acres of mainly Coconino National Forest land west of Sedona.

The annexation would increase the city’s size by 29%.

City Attorney Kurt Christianson explained that the proposed annexation would extend Sedona’s western boundary by approximately three-anda-half miles further west, and then three and a quarter miles south, across an L-shaped area occupied entirely by the Coconino National Forest, Arizona Department of Transportation right-of-way and the city’s Wastewater Reclamation Plant and undeveloped property colloquially known as “the Dells.” State law does not permit municipalities to annex islands, so state contiguity requirements resulted in this shape in order for the city to connect the desired parcels to its existing boundaries.

“There are no other proposed annexations of any real property, although it does touch the Sedona Shadows development,” Christianson said. “No one in Sedona Shadows or Sedona Pines or El Rojo Grande Ranch, their property, is proposed to be annexed in this.”

“It’s literally just a function of bringing in our own owned property within the city limits,” Councilman Brian Fultz said.

“It’s not like we can develop it. We don’t own it,” Christianson said. “It’s just a way to get to the wastewater treatment plant.”

“We did a pretty good job talking about ‘the what’ and ‘the ‘how’ but not ‘the why,’” Furman said. “You leave me scratching my head about what ‘the why’ is, what the problem is we’re working to solve.”

“To show other cities that we are interested in this area and we don’t want other cities coming in to encroach on it,” Christianson said. “Two, it’s to facilitate the development of the city’s transit and maintenance operations facility … This would just make clear that it’s part of the city’s — that [Yavapai] County has no authority over it anymore.”

The proposed transit facility has not yet been approved by council, while outgoing City Transit Administrator Robert Weber has repeatedly referred to the city’s transit program as experimental and said it could shut down due to lack of need.

City Manager Anette Spickard declined to comment on what steps the city would take if it annexed the land but council shutters the transit program.

“Has the county interfered with, or unexpectedly or unnecessarily complicated the work that we’ve done at the water treatment plant?” Furman asked.

“That’s exactly the question,” Christianson said. “We told them we were going to be building this, and they said under what authority can you just do that. It was explained to them, they said we disagree … It was explained that we have this IGA [intergovernmental agreement] with you that says we can do this, and they said that’s inapplicable … We just kind of went back and forth.”

Christianson described staff expenditure on the project so far as “a significant amount of staff time,” “many weeks’ work” and “the greater part of the summer.”

Public Comment

Four Sunset Hills residents spoke on concerns related to having the city’s boundary adjoining that of their community.

“Why suddenly do you feel a need to go out and encompass that?” Trish Janke asked. “It’s been working fine the way it is; why suddenly is there a need for a change?”

“We are still concerned about the vagueness of what’s going to come in the future,” Bonnie Johnson said. “Can we get any assurances of no development back there in the future?”

Development

“The city cannot develop Coconino National Forest,” Christianson said. “The only way anyone could develop Coconino National Forest … would be, I believe, through a land exchange. A land exchange means that you own National Forest property somewhere else and you’re wanting to exchange it with the National Forest — they generally will want more valuable property for less valuable.”

“Often, a land exchange has to be approved by an act of Congress,” Christianson added.

The Red Rock Ranger District has had an effective moratorium on land exchanges since 1998. Land exchanges are rare, such as the one that transferred the property for the future Sedona Cultural Park to a nonprofit in 1998; the 2005 auction of 21 acres of the old Sedona Ranger Station on Brewer Road for $8.4 million; a proposed swap of 369 acres owned by Yavapai County near Cottonwood in 2018 for 80 USFS acres in Cornville; and a recent swap with the Yavapai-Apache Nation to trade 4,782 acres of lands the tribe bought in the Prescott, Coconino, Kaibab and Apache-Sitgreaves national forests for 3,207 acres of USFS land adjacent to tribal lands.

“I really fail to see the necessity of making this effort today,” Furman said. “The city’s cost structure is largely determined by its size … expanding our footprint will likely have a significant impact on future budgets.”

“It’s actually in our interest to have this land be part of the city and under our control,” Vice Mayor Holli Ploog said.

“It is about us having control of what we need to build out there,” Councilwoman Melissa Dunn said.

Councilwoman Kathy Kinsella said she would be more comfortable with Sedona controlling the zoning instead of Yavapai County should a U.S. Forest Service land exchange take place at some point in the future.

“Who’s the best stewards for this area?” Kinsella said. “I think that’s the city of Sedona.”

Furman, Kinsella and Mayor Scott Jablow all rejected the idea of near-term development of the Dells property regardless of whether the annexation went ahead.

“Stuff this genie back in the bottle,” Furman said.

“I think that the way to protect the Dells is by making sure that it comes into the city’s jurisdiction,” Kinsella said. “It’s one of the few really untouched and pure lands that we have … It’s directly on the water, the creek is right down there, it’s riparian.”

It is unclear as of press time what creek Kinsella meant; Oak Creek is approximately 1.4 miles from the Dells at its nearest point and the Verde River is 7.2 miles away. The Dells is currently used for spraying of the treated effluent from the city sewage plant and as leased pasture for cattle.

Council voted 6-1 to proceed with the annexation process, with Furman opposed.

A public hearing on the proposed annexation is currently scheduled for Jan. 14. Council can halt the annexation process at any point during the process.

Council looks at options to move visible homeless elsewhere – Sedona Red Rock News

PUBLISHERS NOTE: This story was updated at 8:40AM on 12/8/24 to remove an inaccurate and out of context quote by Sedona Councilman Pete Furman regarding affordable and workforce housing. This was a Sedona Red Rock News editorial error. We apologize to councilman Furman for any issues this error may have caused.

The Sedona City Council heard a presentation from consultants Jonathan Danforth and Matt White of Viam Advising, with commentary from Sedona Deputy Police Chief and newly-elected Cottonwood City Councilman Christopher Dowell, during its Nov. 26 consideration of the city’s ongoing assessment of homelessness in the Verde Valley.

Per Sedona Housing Manager Jeanne Frieder, the assessment is intended to precede the development of a city strategic plan to reduce homelessness.

“We believe there are roughly 600 individual households or persons that are experiencing homelessness during the course of the year,” White said. “Unfortunately, we don’t have defensible, concrete data sources to draw from, so we had to create this number.”

Their sources for the estimate included the Homeless Information Management System, a set of interlinked federal databases used to track homeless individuals who have enrolled; working with local food banks to track their clients; and discussions with local officials who have contact with the homeless, including police and U.S. Forest Service personnel.

“There aren’t a lot of homeless services for people to participate in, so a service-based enumeration is challenging,” White said.

Danforth and White then forecast a 6% per year increase in homelessness in the Verde Valley over the next five years based on historical rates of increase within Yavapai County, which they predicted would bring the total number of homeless people in the Verde Valley to 800. The Verde Valley has a population of approximately 67,000 and Yavapai County has a population of 236,209.

Using a nationally-developed typology for categorizing homelessness, White estimated that 60% of the homeless would be experiencing “transitional” homelessness for less than three months, while another 30% would be cycling in and out of “episodic” homelessness over the course of a year.

The remainder of the homeless population, White said, consisting of about 60 people across the Verde Valley experiencing chronic homelessness, is “a relatively small proportion of the total homeless population” but “the most visible … there’s more opportunity for them to be seen across the community … and there’s always a co-occurring disability.”

“Research shows that homelessness is driven by a lack of affordability and availability of housing,” Danforth said. Regarding mental health or substance use, he said that “research does not show that those are drivers of homelessness; those are exacerbating factors for homelessness.”

In Sedona and the Verde Valley, White said, “many of the people we spoke to — at least half — are longtime residents of the area” who have run into family, health or housing problems.

However, Danforth said, moving on to recommended actions for coping with homelessness, “housing development is not an immediate answer.”

White stressed “preventing the inflow of newly homeless” through services such as vehicle repair, employment assistance, modest financial assistance and “supporting the relocation of people to other jurisdictions” by providing them with moving assistance to other areas where they might have family members to support them.

“I would say that many of the people that we spoke to would be willing to have the conversation,” White said of relocation.

To reduce existing homelessness — “more people on the streets and in public spaces that’s not consistent with your vision for Sedona and the Verde Valley” — White continued, the city could offer rent subsidies, inhome support and outreach and other services that do not currently exist.

By providing services, White said, “you’re actually reducing visible homelessness in the community.”

Council Questions

Mayor Scott Jablow asked if homeless individuals were liable to relocate to an area where services were available.

“There’s not a magnet effect, or this attraction effect, that you would expect,” White said. “People experiencing homelessness are experiencing extreme poverty and often lack executive function … it’s very difficult for people to think, ‘I’m going to relocate’ … and if they did have that thought, they don’t have the economic means.”

White added that directing spending toward helping the transitional homeless would give the city the best bang for its buck, but “if your interest is reducing the visible homeless, the people that are seen on the street that are flying the signs, that are the reason you’re getting calls from constituents, what feels to be so inconsistent with the character of Sedona,” then spending money on the transitionally homeless would have little effect.

Communities that attempted to penalize homelessness with citations and other punitive measures, White noted, were discovered to have “experienced a slight uptick in homelessness” in a recent study.

“Can you do a little bit of both?” Councilman Derek Pfaff asked. “Carrot and the stick approach, does that work well?”

Danforth replied that police action only had a long-term effect on homelessness numbers when housing was available.

Councilman Brian Fultz asked about the status of city staff’s proposed cold weather voucher program to put homeless individuals up in local hotels.

“We haven’t been able to create a partnership with a hotel,” Frieder said. “To date, we have had zero interest.”

Fultz then asked about the estimated $11,817,363 annual cost of a regional homelessness prevention and support system in the report.

“Why is that a good expenditure of resources?” Fultz asked. “How should we be thinking about that as a benefit to the community? … Selling it is 95% of the challenge.”

Danforth said that the benefit would consist of getting the chronic, visible homeless off the streets, while White said the number was intended “to start the conversation about what is the community willing to live with.”

“You have to build community will as part of this effort,” Danforth said. “When you have political will … that is a really powerful statement that communities usually respond well to.”

The city’s proposal to create a homeless camp at the Sedona Cultural Park was rejected by 64% of voters in a referendum on Nov. 5.

“I don’t want us to get too hung up on, this is the price per homeless person,” Pfaff said, adding that having services would “take some pressure off the police department. It’s going to improve the peace of mind of our residents who are no longer going into stores and having people standing in front of the store asking for money. You really can’t put a price on this.”

Cottonwood Input

“It doesn’t do any good to write them 40 tickets and put them in jail,” Dowell said, based on his experience as a police officer and former interim police chief in Cottonwood. He argued for the importance of more coordination of existing community resources, and of a voucher program, which he said “goes a long way … and we don’t look, as a city, like we don’t care about them.”

Dowell detailed a Cottonwood effort to get businesses to give police officers advance permission to trespass anyone from their property so that officers do not have to request a managers’ permission each time.

Sedona Councilman Pete Furman asked about the connection between panhandling and homelessness, and Dowell replied that about 10% of panhandlers “are people who have resources.”

“The transitional people, they’re out trying to make a living,” Dowell said. As for others, “they’re doing it for their fix or maybe to buy food,” not to pay rent or child support and discussed “professional” panhandlers who he said could make $60 an hour.

“This is America. You’re free to do what you want to do,” Dowell said. “You want to live on the street, live on the street. You can do all these things. What you can’t do is you can’t affect somebody else’s quality of life. Once you do that, now there’s consequences.”

Public Comment

“Why are we counting homelessness in the Verde Valley? I can’t think of seven more disparate cities,” Sedona resident Bill Noonan said. “It’s probably conceptually incorrect to be looking at this.”

“Your consultant is wrong; spending money on homelessness does in fact increase homelessness,” Noonan continued. “I think we need look no further than California, which spent $24 billion over a five-year period and managed to increase homelessness by 25% … National opinion has turned decisively against programs like the ones recommended by your consultants.”

Sedona resident Suzanne Strauss said the study “inaccurately combines data from Sedona with the entire Verde Valley,” uses “flawed methodology” and “outdated data” and “perpetuates a false narrative … harmful to Sedona’s reputation as a beautiful and welcoming destination.”

“The residents have spoken two to one on this issue on Nov. 5 in order to rein in the out-of-control, out-of-touch council and staff and its out-of-control spending,” Strauss added. “It’s studies like these that give credence to no home rule.”

Following the meeting, Frieder said that city staff have no current plans to repeal the city’s anticamping ordinance, to use vacant city buildings to house the homeless, previously suggested by Fultz, or to create a voucher program to pay private individuals with spare rooms to take in homeless individuals.