With the sudden departure of Councilman William Chisholm from the Sedona City Council — he announced last week he was moving to Colorado effective immediately — the city’s legislative body is now one member short.
The 2020 election in August filled three open seats with an incumbent, two official challengers and one official write-in, who, while presenting some new and interesting ideas about problems facing the homeless in Sedona and making the race legally competitive, had no real legitimate chance of ever winning a seat on the council.
Now a solid 16 months away from the regular 2022 election that will decide Chisholm’s seat for the next four years, the Sedona city council is tasked with appointing a seventh person to serve until the election in August 2022.
Sedona City Council seats, like nearly all municipal seats in the state of Arizona, save for some chartered cities, are officially nonpartisan, but political partisanship does play a role in the deliberative process. Council members from different sides of the aisle bring different values, perspectives and priorities to the legislative body that decides what happens in a city.
We highly encourage the current Sedona city council members to consider this when deciding who to appoint to fill Chisholm’s seat.
The current members of the Sedona City Council are overwhelmingly Democrats, which more or less proportionally represents the overall Democratic lean of the Sedona electorate, whose precincts voted for Joe Biden over Donald Trump in the November 2020 election.
Incidentally, the Village of Oak Creek precinct is also overwhelmingly Democratic, based on 2016 and 2020 presidential election results.
Vice Mayor John Martinez and Councilman John Currivan both voluntarily opted out of running for re-election in 2020, and their departures leave Sedona City Council without a bona fide fiscal conservative to raise questions.
Martinez often asked questions of city staff and other leaders regarding the spending on projects, attempting to account for every nickel and dime of city funds. While he wasn’t suggesting that city staff was misspending any taxpayer dollars, nor was that really ever a problem, he did his due diligence like most fiscal conservatives want. If satisfied that the numbers lined up, he could generally be assured to vote in line with other council members.
Currivan often grilled city staff over budgets and plans and, while it could annoy other council members and stretch otherwise quick agenda items into hours, no one could accuse him of rubber-stamping any votes. But all too often he voted against the majority of council even if a project seemingly met with his approval.
While we did commend him for taking a stand on some votes, constantly being on the losing side of 6-1 or the rare 5-2 vote isn’t really a stand so much as a fool’s errand.
The loyal opposition must be flexible to a good argument. The goal of a deliberative body is to convince, cajole, debate, sway and, well, deliberate others to the rightness and righteousness of your position. If a hard-fought discussion fails to win others to your side, voting against the majority on principle is fine. But doing so as a matter of habit is less so. If other council members know that no matter what rhetorical techniques are employed and what logic is articulated, the vote is going to be 6-1, the loudest opposition falls on deaf ears.
Council should look to replace Chisholm with an appointee who can bring forth views from the other side of the aisle, but is still pliable enough to bend when needed, forceful enough to stand firm when required and diplomatic enough to convince when the topic is debatable.
We encourage residents from all sides of the political spectrum, former council members and new, to consider applying. We also strongly suggest council members consider intellectual and political diversity in who they select rather than appointing an empty-vote loyalist.
Also, council should strongly consider any applicant under age 50, “young” enough to not yet be retired.
Christopher Fox Graham
Managing Editor
