Letter to the Editor: Is the State-Imposed Spending Limit Workable in Sedona?

By Sedona City Council Member Pete Furman

Sedona, AZ — I have been on the Sedona City Council since 2022, and I know that budgeting is a very complex process in Sedona. I believe a well-structured city budget is essential to keep city services running at optimal levels while continuing to help fund the library, the recycling center, and many other community-serving nonprofits. Setting the budget involves every city department, staff, the city manager, the finance director, the council, the mayor, a citizens’ budget committee, and several public hearings. It takes many months to complete. And many say it’s a mind-numbing experience.

The process we follow is enabled by Home Rule. Full disclosure: I am a proponent of Home Rule, but this is not pro v con piece, it’s just an analysis of what might be. As always, I’m speaking only for myself, not for the Council or city staff.

In my view, Home Rule is a mechanism whereby the voters grant the city the privilege of setting an upper bound on spending through its annual budget process. One aspect that I believe makes Home Rule the best tool is that it requires voter renewal on a four-year cycle. This requires the city to justify its past performance and demonstrate an ongoing commitment to good fiscal stewardship, with the voters serving as judges.

Opponents of Home Rule, often unhappy with various spending or policy decisions spanning years, launch efforts to end it. I understand they want a reset – to apply pressure to projects and policies and to enforce a level of fiscal discipline they think is lost.

When these arguments occur, some voices insist that voting Home Rule down doesn’t have to affect the city’s nonprofits or the things residents love, like our parks and the community pool – that we can live within the state-set spending limit. They insist the city uses scare tactics to encourage voters to renew Home Rule.

While it’s true that Council could choose differently, there are laws and mandates from the state that require a city to provide certain things. If money is left over after the mandates, community amenities and nonprofits can be funded. But if Home Rule is voted down and the city is forced under what’s called the state-imposed expenditure limit, there is very little money to work with.

I wanted to put those claims to a test: is it possible to create a budget that funds the nonprofits and keeps the city running at satisfactory levels if Home Rule were defeated? I called it the Skinny Chicken budget. So I spent my Fourth of July weekend, armed with Sedona’s FY2026-27 adopted budget and an AI assistant (Claude), to see what I could do.

Spoiler: it took three tries – and the version that technically complies has bad news – we had to cut the police department by 72%.

To be clear: I don’t support any of these budgets. This was a personal exercise to test what’s actually possible – I’m speaking only for myself, not the Council or city staff. It’s also a ‘wounded duck’, because its likely we’ll all start talking about a one-time budget override and/or a PBA if Home Rule fails.

The full analysis, with every number sourced from city documents, is on my website: https://sedonapete.com/2026/07/05/1759/

Pete Furman Has A Few Concerns About Our Home Rule Debate. Here We Go Again

Sedona, AZ — Sedona voters are facing another “Home Rule” campaign, and if the “No” arguments feel familiar, that’s because they are. Same arguments, largely the same voices, every four years, for over a decade. The villain changes each cycle – roundabouts, housing, roads, a particular councilmember – but not the rhetoric. It’s like shouting “fire” on a four-year cycle.

It’s strange and frustrating because each time since 1996 the majority has approved Home Rule. They understand the difference between “I’m unhappy with a specific decision” and “let’s kill the mechanism that pays for police, roads, parks, and non-profits to the standards Sedona expects.”

If You’re Upset About Spending, There’s A Process For That

The anti-Home Rule activists resurface in a predictable cycle, not offering input into next year’s budget, but running a campaign to blow up the funding structure entirely. If the goal is to choose good projects and improve fiscal management, that energy would be better spent in the budget process than in an anti-Home Rule ballot measure campaign.

What’s Actually At Stake

Home Rule doesn’t raise taxes and never has. It simply sets a city budget ceiling, based on the revenue the city already collects – responsive to local conditions and local needs.

This year, however, voters are being enticed with a risky alternative: kill Home Rule and live with annual budget override votes in special elections, until a Permanent Base Adjustment (PBA) is approved.

What could go wrong? Special elections have always existed but are rarely used, for good reasons. Preparing for and winning a special election comes with no guarantees. It’s costly, and if a vote fails, it leaves the city with service cuts for up to two years, until a PBA is approved and/or Home Rule restored. Override votes can fail.

Special elections might sound appealing, but they can favor special interests. With turnout typically smaller than in a regular election, a committed, organized group can swing the outcome and push through unrepresentative results.

How many of us are eager to vote annually on a complex and hard-to-understand budget? Even Councilors must catch their breath after the exhausting budget process (speaking from experience). With a low turnout, will a majority truly rule, or the most organized minority?

I can’t see a single reason to advocate for the death of Home Rule.

What’s my advice? (Yes, I’ve been asked by Sedona voters.) Vote YES on Home Rule. Then we embark on the PBA conversation – as soon after this election as we can bear. But please know the conversation won’t be simple. Many won’t have the time or the energy to fully engage. That’s understandable. And in the end, Home Rule might still be the best approach.

Vote YES On Home Rule

Submitted to Sedona.biz on 7/1/26 by Pete Furman. Pete Furman and his wife Lisa live in West Sedona. Pete has served on the Sedona City Council since 2022 and is not seeking reelection. When not riding either his road or mountain bike, Pete keeps local area doctors gainfully employed. The opinions expressed here are his alone and do not represent the position of City Council or city staff.  

Council OKs $97,963,222 FY27 budget – Sedona Red Rock News

Council OKs $97,963,222 FY27 budget

The vote was 6-0 with Councilwoman Charlotte Hosseini absent. There were no major changes from the tentative budget council approved on May 26.

“We are continuing to hold sales and bed tax revenues flat,” Deputy City Manager Barbara Whitehorn said. “We are seeing year-over-year increases, however, given the global uncertainty, that seems to be a more prudent way to move forward.”

The approval caps six months of work that began with the priority retreat Dec. 16 through 18, during which the council expressed little desire to increase the number of municipal employees and favored a more conservative budget in light of economic volatility. This led the council to call for a zero-based budget model, in which every expense was justified from scratch rather than every department adjusting its previous year’s budget.

The FY 2027 budget marks the second consecutive year the total budget has fallen from its all-time high of $106.1 million in Fiscal Year 2025. While the FY 2027 budget is a 5% reduction from the current year’s $103.3 million budget, that decrease is driven by a 20% drop in capital projects, from $42 million to $34 million, as projects such as the Uptown Parking Garage near completion. The garage does not currently have an opening date because its decorative exterior wall is under structural engineering review.

Operating budget year-over-year grew 4% from $61.235 million to nearly $64 million, with nearly five full-time equivalent employees added, with three of those positions created specifically to aid local schools following a March 25 joint session with Sedona-Oak Creek School District, when council directed city staff to find ways to financially back local schools, which are independent from city government.

This lead to the creation of full-time recreation programming coordinator in the Parks & Recreation Department for after-school programming, a Parks & Recreation janitor to aid the program, and a full-time maintenance worker who will also maintain the Sedona Red Rock High School’s baseball field, with the goal of improving SOCSD student recruitment and retention.

The city committed $76,000 to hire a school security consultant for both SOCSD campuses, and a series of smaller one-time appropriations for SOCSD that focus largely on security improvements — with the independent Sedona Charter School receiving $23,000 in new playground equipment.

Other staff changes in the budget are the creation of a full-time Information Technology support employee, a converting a part-time court specialist to full-time, and converting a part-time bicycle pedestrian coordinator into a full-time position.

In FY 2023, the city had 177.5 full-time employees; 201.65 in the current fiscal year, with a total increase of 4.97 FTEs in the approved FY 2027 budget.

Among the operating increases, the city’s most significant are an Arizona State Retirement System contribution of roughly $1.9 million; a $766,000 increase to the city’s community service contracts with Community Library Sedona; $300,000 for advertising and tourism; $250,000 for a mini street sweeper for the Uptown garage; $150,000 added to the pavement preservation and road rehabilitation contract; $125,000 for an Uptown Community Focus Area design services; $100,000 for pre-approved house plans required under Senate Bill 1529, and $75,000 for updating the city website.

The city also moved to pay off the remaining balance on several debts, including financing for energy conservation equipment; micro-transit vehicles; a vactor truck, a dump truck and snowplow and police vehicles, with at a total cost of $948,053 and an interest savings of $75,548.

Capital Projects

Whitehorn flagged capital projects that several residents had raised as costing more than the budget allocates, such as a debunked claim the city intended to overspend on purchasing the Brewer Road building, home to the Parks and Recreation Department and City Court offices, from SOCSD before any serious talks had occurred.

Sedona City Council candidates Jean-Christophe Buillet and Rich Gay, as part of their campaign, made a social media video citing the city’s West Sedona Intercept Lot at SR 89A and Upper Red Rock Loop. The project, PT-05, carries a $100,000 appropriation in Fiscal Year 2027 to 2028, and last year’s FY ’25 to ‘26 Annual Budget had included a $24.8 million placeholder “for a possible parking garage” that has since been removed.

“The eventual plan was to possibly add a parking garage out there, but it was determined in evaluating the capital projects that that was an unlikely thing for us to do in the next 10 years,” Whitehorn said. “So that is no longer in the budget, there, so if you look at last year’s budget, there was a placeholder for that, and in … coming fiscal year, that is not in there.”

The modeling approach for the Fiscal Year 2027-28, budget will be decided at a future meeting.