If one were to look at city programs, the COVID- 19 pandemic emergency is over.
Logically, that’s simply what Sedona leaders are saying, but “logic” and “simply” are words lost on elected officials.
Perhaps elected officials should also be schooled by getting a dictionary after their election in addition to Robert’s Rules of Order. Elected legislators are the same folks who tout their “common sense” and “rational” legislation that is apparently so “common sense” that it has never been made law ever before, has to be battled in committee and the floor, and will only pass on the narrowest of party-line votes.
So for our elected officials who don’t appear to understand the dumpster fire of government logic unless there’s an actual fire, imagine this:
Your house catches on fire. You call for firefighters and you turn on the garden hose to put out the flames in the meantime.
You don’t turn off the hose and send the firefighters away if the house is still burning. You fight the fire.
If you turn off the hose and tell the firefighters to leave the scene it must be because the fire is extinguished. You don’t send them away from a burning house, and you don’t still say “the house is on fire” because it’s not.
Yet that’s what Sedona’s leaders and specifically its mayor are apparently telling small businesses and residents.
COVID-19 was the fire that struck a year ago, so the mayor declared an emergency. To keep small businesses from going under due to government actions, the city waived outdoor sign rules. To keep businesses from losing needed funds paying sewer bills for near-empty stores, the city implemented a temporary subsidy rate for wastewater fees. According to city leaders, these were done at a time when we were all expecting a sudden drop in visitation due to the governor’s stay-at-home suggestion in April 2020.
The city also implemented a Temporary Residential Wastewater Subsidy Rate Program for residents that helped out-of-work residents pay for flushing their toilets.
Now the city is ending the sign waiver and reinstituting signage rules as if no pandemic existed. Now the city is terminating its sewer subsidies — money it has been paying itself for its own bills — and will be charging for wastewater as if no pandemic existed.
By changing the sign rules and withdrawing the sewer fee help that help businesses still struggling, no pandemic exists anymore, right? That’s what the city is arguing by repealing these relief programs.
It’s fascinating how in a pandemic the only thing that really matters is how much tax revenue the city can make. Outgoing City Manager Justin Clifton was proud to tout in the city’s recent annual report that his staff made it through the pandemic with zero layoffs.
Don’t get me wrong, Sedona city staff are some of the best and brightest in the state, which is why they work here. However, when government leadership touts the fact that in a pandemic no city workers were laid off when hundreds of working-class Sedonans and working-class residents from all over the Verde Valley who have been driving to Sedona day after day, week after week for years, were now out of work because their own government forcibly shut down their places of employment and reduced their hours, yet kept collecting taxes and fees like everything is hunky-dory, it is not just offensive.
Whose tax collections were paying city staff salaries? The money didn’t come from thin air.
For city leaders to say they screwed over the workers and their employers but that government leaders were proud that they have used workers’ tax dollars to keep ourselves employed is governmental selfishness that should be condemned not celebrated.
It is cruel.
So the decision for city leadership is clear: Repeal all the emergency orders and get life back to normal or reinstitute all the pandemic sewer fee subsidies and sign waivers so workers, businesses and residents can survive. The city demands its pound of flesh. Give suffering workers the means to pay it.
Christopher Fox Graham
Managing Editor
