Pete Furman

City Council plans homeless camp at Sedona Cultural Park – Sedona Red Rock News

At its Jan. 9 meeting, the Sedona City Council unanimously directed city staff to move ahead with planning for the creation of a homeless campground for local workers living in their cars at the Sedona Cultural Park, which the city purchased in November 2022 for more than $23 million.

Housing ‘Supplement’

“It’s a supplement to affordable housing,” city Housing Manager Shannon Boone told the council while presenting the staff proposal, describing the homeless campground as a “temporary solution to a complex problem.”

The homeless campground will initially include 40 parking spaces and may be expanded over time. “I don’t envision this site being full immediately,” Boone said. “If it fills up fast, we’ll grow the site.” These will be supplemented by portable showers and restrooms powered by a diesel generator.

Director of Public Works Kurt Harris explained that the graywater from the showers will be dumped at the site. “If you don’t contain it, it’s not a hazard” per Arizona Department of Environmental Quality rules, Harris said. “The trees’ll love it.”

“Even if it’s soapy?” Mayor Scott Jablow asked.

“It’s totally legal,” Harris said.

“I hadn’t thought of potable water,” Boone said in reply to a question from Councilwoman Jessica Williamson.

City sustainability manager Bryce Beck did not respond to multiple requests for comment on how the homeless campground’s dumping of water and use of approximately 19,000 gallons of diesel fuel per year will be compatible with the city’s sustainability plan and Climate Action Plan.

Location

The proposed location for the homeless campground is the festival grounds area of the Cultural Park. The site will be run by the Verde Valley Homeless Coalition, which will provide an onsite manager.

Local workers using the campground will be required to leave with their vehicles during the day to prevent encampments “and other undesirable activities.” A maximum of two adults per vehicle will be allowed, and one occupant must be able to present proof of employment or school attendance in Sedona. Councilman Pete Furman suggested “co-opting employers” to get them to refer their employees to the homeless campground and possibly requiring an employer referral for admission. Entry will not be permitted after 10 p.m. except by prior arrangement, vehicles will not be allowed to leave after checking in and remote workers will not be permitted to use the campground.

The site rules would also prohibit:

• Tents or canopies
• Drugs, alcohol and smoking
• Congregating outside of vehicles
• Visitors
• Sleeping with the engine running
• Using headlights
• Fires

Boone said the list of rules would be required “to maintain control of the site.” Housing coordinator Jeanne Frieder said that if any non-permitted substances or items are seen, the site manager will confiscate them.

VVHC executive director Rhonda Bishop said the area will be patrolled every two hours by the site manager. Individuals will be required to pack out their own trash, and if they leave trash behind, it will be traced to their site registration and they will be penalized for littering.

“People do have to be directed at times,” Bishop said. VVHC board member Chip Norton described their shelter in Cottonwood as “disciplined.”

To ensure user compliance, Harris proposed the use of motion sensor cameras to monitor the site “through Skynet.”

“I was excited by the idea of sensors that could perhaps alert police,” Williamson said.

City staff and site administrators will be trying to get site users to enroll in one of VVHC’s “service plans” to oblige them to commit to programs, requiring a 37-page application, and their housing outcomes will be monitored. Boone said the city aims to divert 50% of those car campers into permanent housing.

“The vehicular homeless are so high-functioning, they know how to stay hidden,” Boone commented. “They don’t want to be thought of as traditional homeless and they don’t have a lot of other needs that they particularly want to be filled, such as getting on an individual service plan.”

“We haven’t seen what your metrics are,” Councilman Pete Furman said to Boone. “I’m assuming that those aren’t in as good a shape yet, and if this moves forward from tonight, we give you some direction, that we’ll see those before this program gets fully kicked off?”

“That’s something we are still working on,” Boone replied. “Perhaps we won’t identify those benchmarks before the program is approved.”

“I would encourage you to make good progress on benchmarks before the program is approved,” Furman said.

Costs

Staff proposed that if a nightly rather than a monthly fee is charged, $2 per night would be appropriate.

“$2 a night seems kind of low,” Mayor Scott Jablow said. “Have other numbers been bounced around?”

Boone compared the suggested fee to the daily cost of a gym membership that someone who is homeless might purchase in order to shower.

The camp is estimated to cost $151,334 for startup costs and $434,015 in annual operating costs, the latter of which will be covered by a $875,638 two-year grant from the Arizona Department of Housing.

City Attorney Kurt Christianson stated that he does not expect the use of the site for a homeless campground to affect Sabrina Beram’s lawsuit against the city for refusing to grant her an exemption to its anti-camping ordinance. Christianson previously informed Beram that the city could not grant exemptions to the ordinance and that sleeping in a car was unsafe.

Jablow and Councilman Brian Fultz referred to the campground as a “great start” on providing housing solutions, while Williamson said it was “targeting the right group” and that including the traditional homeless would be “disastrous.”

“There’s nothing so permanent as a temporary government program,” Furman remarked. “Maybe this has a role in the Cultural Park,” adding that it would be difficult to kill the program once started.

“Not every parent chooses for their children to live the way we think they should be living,” Councilwoman Melissa Dunn said. “That could be our prejudicial view.”

Public Comment

Thirteen members of the public spoke in support of the proposed homeless campground, while several called attention to nuances overlooked in the proposal.

“You can do 14 days in the national forest,” said Aaron Ingrao, speaking on current parking limitations. “When I first got here, I thought that maybe I could rent a spot from someone’s house that I knew. Turns out that was illegal. Thought maybe I could park at work. Turns out that’s illegal. One way or the other, every single night I’m in town, I’m breaking the law.”

“This proposal actually is a proposal we have been sending to the city for about four years now,” Sedona Area Homeless Alliances chairwoman Laurie Moore said, but expressed reservations with the city’s iteration of it. “How is somebody only given a safe sleep as a reward for working? That is cruel … Anybody that’s part of this program will be submitted to the [Homeless Management Information System], a federal database for homeless people, and many of our people do not want that to happen, so it will exclude them also. Less than half of the local Sedona homeless population have vehicles … [Homeless] children are being taken directly from school and put into foster care, so we now have at least half of the families who have now decided not to enroll their children in public school … This is being set up for people to prove they deserve a safe sleep.”

“Feeling good about giving them a place to sleep in a car — I can’t even believe it,” Sandra Wade said. “In a community like this, where there’s money? … We have to sit here and talk about allowing our workers to sleep in a car and think we’re doing something? … We all have something here to contribute financially to get our workforce in some accommodation … is that too much to ask of all of us? … I ask you to please look at another alternative.”

Sedona City Council rejects own study on OHVs & health6 min read (redrocknews.com)

The city of Sedona’s latest study on the environmental effects of off-highway vehicles, which became available in June, revealed that there are no significant environmental or health problems resulting from the use of OHVs inside or outside the city. The members of the Sedona City Council have subsequently rejected the study’s results, questioning their validity.

Study Results

The purpose of the study, as outlined by City Manager Karen Osburn, was “to discern whether or not there were environmental impacts significant enough that would necessitate banning OHVs on city streets.” The study was conducted by the consulting firm Kimley-Horn, the only respondent to two separate RFPs the city had issued, at a cost of $99,000.

The study examined traffic at the trailheads on Soldier Pass Road, Forest Road 152C, Schnebly Hill Road, Dry Creek Road and Broken Arrow Road. The average daily number of OHVs observed at each location, including SUVs, ATVs and UTVs, was 111 for Broken Arrow, 114 for Dry Creek, 197 for Schnebly Hill, 153 for FR 152C and 25 for Soldier Pass. SUVs such as Jeeps accounted for 28% of traffic on FR 152C, 56% on Dry Creek, 70% on Schnebly Hill, 83% at Soldier Pass and 84% at Broken Arrow.

Only on FR 152C were side-by-side UTVs the dominant vehicle type, at 53%.

The majority of OHVs observed at all locations except Soldier Pass were personal vehicles, which accounted for 43% of trips on Dry Creek, 47% on Schnebly Hill, 53% on Broken Arrow and 57% on FR 152C.

Tours accounted for more than 30% of traffic on Broken Arrow, Dry Creek and Schnebly Hill; 15% on FR 152C; and 83% on Soldier Pass.

Ambient noise levels at trailheads were between 48.6 and 62.8 decibels, while noise levels observed during the passage of OHVs ranged from 72.9 to 98.7 dB. As the report noted, short-term hearing damage occurs at or above noise levels of 120 dB, or more than 100 times greater than those produced by the passage of an OHV — the decibel scale is logarithmic, not linear.

The average noise levels generated during periods of vehicle activity was 87 dB, below the level of 90 dB at which hearing damage can occur over periods of prolonged exposure. The report stated that the highest observed level of OHV noise was “similar to standing next to a gas-powered lawnmower.”

Average dust levels were measured for both 10-micron and 2.5-micron particle sizes. The results obtained for 10-micron particles were 16 micrograms per cubic meter at Dry Creek, 18 at Schnebly Hill, 21 at Soldier Pass and the upwind section of Broken Arrow, 41 on the downwind section of Broken Arrow and 66 on FR 152C, an unpaved road. For 2.5- micron particles, the results were 9 μg/m3 on Schnebly Hill, 11 on both sections of Broken Arrow, 13 at Soldier Pass and Dry Creek and 30 on FR 152C. Federal air quality standards for dust exposure include thresholds of 35 μg/m3 for 2.5-micron particles and 150 μg/m3 for 10-micron particles.

“None of the results were anywhere near a threshold,” Osburn summarized. “Yes, the rain was a factor, but they were nowhere near what they needed to be in order to have a justification from a health perspective to ban OHVs.”

Council Reception

“This report sits in city files and is subject to any kind of public request to see it,” Councilman Pete Furman said during the council’s priority retreat on Dec. 13. “I’m really quite concerned about this study … Not only did we have experts in the field come out and do a dust study two days after it rained … I just don’t know how that fits in any expert’s professional ethics.”

“We also know at this point that [Forest Road] 152 and [Forest Road] 525 were closed for parts of this study,” Furman said. The study did not examine traffic on FR 525.

“Where I would like to take this now is for us to put a cover page on that report that talks about all of our concerns and that this report is really not valid, and that anyone in the future that accesses that report sees that we have more questions, we really shouldn’t rely on that data,” Furman said.

“The report is accurate for what it was,” Osburn said. “That’s a point-in-time analysis, and that analysis is accurate for that point in time.”

She explained that Kimley-Horn’s air quality expert “was pretty adamant that even at the highest levels measured, it would not have necessitated or warranted a ban of OHVs because our lungs are built to take in bad stuff for short durations of time.”

“We’ve stood out at the Aerie Trailhead, and we’ve seen air quality there that exceeds the worst I’ve ever seen in Phoenix in the ’80s,” Furman said. “It’s terrible … We’ve done some work and we’re convinced ourselves that there are flaws in the study, but we’re not communicating that … That report didn’t meet our standards.”

“It was as bad as LA ever was,” Vice Mayor Holli Ploog said of a recent trip outside the city limits. “They kept coming and coming … Most of them were owner-owned. They were not rental company vehicles.”

“It’s unfortunate that the study was flawed,” Councilwoman Kathy Kinsella said. “I’m very disappointed in a company that we have had such an active relationship with on so many projects didn’t see fit to say, ‘These are not the right conditions’ … It really is a very poor reflection of their relationship with us.”

“When we start to look at their conclusions around noise, they didn’t measure noise next to where houses are,” Councilwoman Melissa Dunn said. “They measured where the trailheads were. So again, just flawed methodology … I would have expected better for our money.”

Sound pressure levels decrease as the inverse square of distance, so it is not possible for sound levels to be higher in a home at some distance from a trailhead than at the trailhead itself.

“Since we’re not going to rely on the draft but it exists, something simple could maybe go on there, like ‘unaccepted draft’ or ‘draft not used.’ I don’t see the harm in putting something on there that makes it clear that this is a document that has not informed positions that we’re taking,” Kinsella said.

“I would agree to have that ‘unaccepted’ — either a stamp put on it or a cover letter,” Mayor Scott Jablow said.

“Just as a reminder, we have no evidence whatsoever that the end result would be anything different,” Osburn said.

“Right. But we don’t have to accept it,” Jablow said.

“It sounds like many of you believe that there is a health issue,” Osburn said. “And if you believe that there’s a health issue … but we don’t want to assess whether or not it actually does exist, then I just want to make sure that we’re saying, ‘We think it does and we’re concerned about it, but we’re not wanting to do anything further.’”

Councilwoman Jessica Williamson expressed a dissenting view from that of her colleagues.

“I think we should drop this,” Williamson said. “We basically made an arrangement, an agreement, with the OHV people. They’re putting a lot of money into their vehicles on the understanding that if they did that, we would not move forward with banning their vehicles. I believe that’s an agreement we have, and I don’t believe we should seek to back out of that agreement by a different method at this point. I think we made our bed, we made our decision, and I would not support moving forward through another avenue … I would be morally against doing something at this point to try and get OHVs off the road given the conversations we’ve had with the owners.”