Sedona residents may have noticed the army of municipal workers marking pavement with paint and flags in Uptown now that the first Sedona in Motion project officially started on Monday, June 3.
Residents may have bumped into some of the scores of surveyors along State Route 89A in Uptown over the last few weeks getting ready to launch the project.
Residents, business owners and Sedona workers who live in other parts of the Verde Valley and commute in may have had their smartphones blow up over the last few days inundated with dozens of automated text messages informing them about the temporary traffic changes or updates about SIM’s ongoing progress.
Residents may have had to find alternative places to park in Uptown with all the contractor trucks occupying spots and seen an armada of orange cones blocking lanes or sidewalks or parking spots so contractors with sledgehammers and heavy equipment can begin.
Resident may have experienced these things if they had happened.
Perhaps they occurred in an a parallel dimension that we will see when our universes harmonize and merge as the planets align.
Perhaps the contractor is a holistic one and we’ll just have to trust that traffic improvements were made without any scientific verification.
Perhaps the city has contracted the work to a battalion of ninjas, whose skills at stealth defy comprehension.
It’s a stretch, but odder things are known to happen in Sedona.
As of press time, after the official start of the Sedona in Motion project on June 3, 2019, the city looks a lot like it did March 31, 2018, or Aug. 9, 2017. Aside from one text message from SIM’s text notification system on May 31 announcing “Reminder: Uptown Sedona construction begins June 3,” our phones have been silent.
There’s not a lot of nuance in that message. It doesn’t state “surveying work” or “preliminary estimations,” it reads “construction.”
Other than that message, there hasn’t been much else and certainly no “motion” in Sedona in Motion thus far.
Perhaps this is the reason the project will last until July 2020.
We did receive word from passersby on June 3 that a large group of orange-vested workers were standing at the Y roundabout and along State Route 179, and they were still there chatting in roughly the same spots when we sent a photographer down.
We wonder if city officials are aware of the optics of this to the average resident who has been told that a year-long Sedona in Motion project would kick off June 3 only to witness nothing but workers talking on the side of the road, nary a construction tool or survey device in hand.
We want to tell readers the city and its contractors are is hard at work, putting our tax dollars to use making necessary traffic improvements, but the city isn’t making it easy to tell this narrative.
We had hoped the city had already sent out surveyors in the past few weeks to gauge elevations and sight lines and that as of June 3, when city officials, documents and the city’s own public notification system said construction would start, we would see cones in the roadway and workers chopping up concrete or asphalt.
But alas, we can’t tell our readers this.
We understand that the Sedona City Council is currently investing its time in the Forest Road connector, a vital road that will provide an egress from Uptown to State Route 89A to avoid the time-sucking roundabouts of Brewer Road and State Route 179.
After council votes and allocates funds, it delegates projects to city staff and contractors to complete.
Perhaps council members could see a group of taxpayer-funded workers on the side of the road apparently doing nothing of consequence and tell them, “Taxpayers are driving by! Do some work! Or at least, look busy! Look at your phones; we told everyone ‘construction’ starts today!”
— Christopher Fox Graham
Managing Editor
