The Sedona-Oak Creek School District Governing Board is holding off its vote on the city of Sedona’s rental of West Sedona School’s fenced field for overflow park-and-ride transit parking until its December meeting.
Sedona Director of Public Works Andy Dickey and Transit Administrator Robert Weber presented the city’s proposal to use the field sitting adjacent to the elementary school’s building for the upcoming transit project. This would serve as a parking lot for the trailhead transit system Thursday through Sunday, which is expected to begin by next summer.
The school board elected to postpone the motion until board members were able to visit the park-and-ride site themselves.
With no school resource officer at West Sedona School, Lauren Robinson, vice president of the school board, stated her concern regarding security measures and traffic in a place for the elementary school and its students.
“It’s not necessarily the parking [that’s an issue] … it is the draw of so many people next to our little kids,” Robinson said, “people that we have no control over where they are coming from, what their attack might be, and no extra staff to monitor. It concerns me to have 120 parking spaces advertised.”
The fenced field will hold around 80 parking spots. Across from the field, the city is already constructing a 40-car parking lot for the transit park-and-ride. And according to Weber, this makes the school’s field the ideal spot for another parking lot.
Since 2018, when transportation discussions initially began, the city has been working on final transit implementation. And according to Dickey, the popular trailheads Dry Creek/Mescal and Soldier Pass, have seen over 217,000 unique visits to each area in the past 12 months. The Dry Creek Trailhead has seen double Soldier Pass. The city has attributed some of this increase in trailhead traffic to the rise in tourism due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
“The parking here is specifically for transit,” Dickey said. “Our intent will be to have signs that direct people to go where we want them to go, and dissuade them from going into the school.”
Sedona In Motion, the city council’s master transportation plan, was created in response to transportation issues such as those experienced at the trailheads. Back in August, the city leased five transit vans with a $712,000 budget for the shuttle system. With the city council’s recent vote to permanently continue the half-cent sales tax for transit usage, the city hopes these buses will have a steady stream of funding.
“We want to move the parking to where we want it to be. We want to take it out from where we do not want it and control it,” Dickey said. “We want to reduce the impacts on the environment. And we want to make it an easy access to the trailheads.”
In response to the presentation, school board members stated their concern with the shuttle system’s traffic during the school’s drop-off and pick-up times. Together with the elementary school’s parents and bus system, the trailhead buses would add to the traffic during the beginning and end of the school day.
“This particular location is centrally located and easily accessible to motorists with proper wayfinding, which will be a part of our program,” Weber said.
The Posse Grounds location would serve the Mescal Trailhead with 45-minute frequency, the Soldier Pass Trailhead with 25-minute frequency, and the Dry Creek Trailhead with 60- minute frequency. This free shuttle service would run 20-passenger hybrid vans leased by the city, outfitted with bike racks and video surveillance.
The lease will be discussed again at the next school board meeting in December. If the lease is approved, the city will pay $9,800 annually to Sedona- Oak Creek School District for use of the field.
