Happy new year. With the abysmal 2020 now fully recorded in the history books, we can begin looking toward the future.
The state of Arizona and both Yavapai and Coconino counties have begun rolling out vaccines to battle the COVID-19 pandemic, with many health care workers already receiving their vaccination shots at Verde Valley Medical Center in Cottonwood.
Despite nationwide restrictions and recommendations to avoid travel and gathering, Sedona residents have noticed that traffic backups stretching from Tlaquepaque and up Cooks Hill to Airport Road are as bad as they would be in the summer in a non-pandemic year,
That only begs the question: Once vaccination becomes widespread, do traffic patterns return to normal, or will our bottleneck get even worse?
Despite the economic devastation from the government response to COVID-19, we were lucky that traffic improvements in Uptown were built when they were. The final months of construction occurred when tourists were absent from Sedona’s roads, speeding up crews’ work on the roadways and allowing locals to acclimate to the new lane in Uptown, the Owenby Lane detour off the northern roundabout and the restricted views of the median barriers without tourists gumming up the works.
No matter how cosmetic or effective the improvements are in Uptown, the problem was, is and perhaps forever will be the bottleneck on Cooks Hill.
From Airport Road to Ranger Road, there is no way to avoid this eastbound, two-lane bottleneck.
Unlike other things affecting the city of Sedona, traffic is something local leaders can fix.
Local leaders have been hamstrung by Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey’s office to do much of anything about a COVID-19 pandemic response.
It’s also about time for Sedona’s mayor to end our “state of emergency.” After 10 months, it’s not an “emergency;” it’s the way things are now.
The Arizona State Legislature hamstrung the city of Sedona and all other towns, cities and counties in the state from doing anything to regulate short-term rentals, throwing one more wrench into the cogs of affordable housing, or even reasonable homeownership.
Young working families who dream of owning a home move to the Village of Oak Creek or other Verde Valley communities — taking their children out of the Sedona school district.
It’s no wonder that the majority of young people who grow up here never return — they can’t afford to unless they inherit their parents’ homes.
Those of us who are middle-class and/or working professionals who have lived in Sedona for one, two or three decades only have the option of buying a house in the city we call home if a wealthy relative dies. But every year, Sedona City Council pays lip service to “affordable housing” while doing nothing of substance.
Maybe someone we elect in the 2022 election will bother to try.
So our leaders are impotent when it comes to public health, inept, deaf and unwilling in relation to reasonable housing, however, traffic is well within their purview and arguably the one and only thing they should know better than state, county or national officials.
And yet, despite urging, cajoling, begging and producing workable options, local leaders view traffic as “too hard,” or cower when a single angry resident posts something nasty on Facebook or they opine that government “moves at the speed of a narcoleptic snail.”
Um, no, you move at that speed, council members. You’re that “government.” And you make conscious choices to kick the can down Cooks Hill, refuse to make decisions about new roads or lanes or connectors that might interfere with your re-elections and give more weight to those meanies with the bad words on Facebook than to residents sitting in traffic just trying to get home.
It’s also about time for Sedona’s mayor to end our “state of emergency.” After 10 months, it’s not an “emergency;” it’s the way things are now. It’s also ignored, flaunted and often unenforced.
It’s amazing that the mayor could unilaterally impose news rules in hours but then take 10 months to relinquish that power.
Who knew “snails” could move so lightning fast when the politics benefited their re-election?
Christopher Fox Graham
Managing Editor
