The Sedona City Council is about ready to vote to approve the 2022-23 budget, which will be the largest in the city’s history, dwarfing the last years’ budgets by tens of millions of dollars.

Many fiscally conservative Sedona residents on both sides of the partisan aisle balk at such an enormous number — $105,745,040 for a town of only 9,684 residents.

While various elected officials and candidates running for office have attempted to spin this largess as being not that big given the circumstances, objectively this budget is gigantic by any metric: It’s more than the annual expenditures for the nation of Palau.

It’d be one thing if this massive budget was earned by the city during an economic boom when residents rich and poor were making money hand over fist and the good times were rolling like it was the 1920s and Sedona was called Moonshineville, but we are, in fact, teetering on a recession, where inflation has made everything from baby formula to milk to apples more expensive, gas prices are the highest in 40 years and working families from Wisconsin to West Sedona are suffering while multiple-property owners are flipping houses to each other as vacation rentals or second homes like we’re in cocaine-fueled film starring Gordon Gekko.

It’s inexplicable.

Sedona City Council has touted a huge budget as a victory of economic prowess, but with so many working class families in Sedona disproportionately affected by high sales tax as our dollars are worth less and less, we’re the ones to suffer.

For instance, this council seems oblivious that the Uptown parking garage was floated as an $11 million project, but now council is willing to spend $18 million due to higher prices specifically due to the price of concrete, cement and building supplies rather the locking down a bid sooner before prices skyrocketed.

That extra $7 million could have built a park or apartment complex, but is incomprehensibly just lost to inaction. With a recession looming or commodities prices about to drop, maybe the city should hold off until costs drop.

It’s also unconscionable that the city of Sedona voted for a traffic tax in 2018, intended to sunset after 10 years. Yet after only three, this current City Council voted to make that tempo­rary 0.5% sales tax permanent.

Sales taxes charged on every good disproportionately affect the poor and middle class. This council doesn’t care. It’s more than happy to rake in dollars during a major economic downturn rather than cancel this tax to help the poorest residents during lean times.

Council members who claim correctly that tourists pay the majority of our tax income — 77% — neglect to mention the other 23% comes from us residents. We pay every day, every week, every month every year until we die or move away. My college degree was not in economics, but clearly our Sedona City Council is being outsmarted by a poet with zero fiscal acumen, and I’m embarrassed enough for us both.

Rather than offer a modicum of relief by repealing the traffic tax, or cutting sales tax, council instead chooses to spend money on things like the Sedona Shuttle, which takes tourists — not residents, tourists — from trailheads to parking lots and inexpli­cably moves a parking problem from outside our city to Posse Grounds Park and from one neighborhood to another.

Tourists come here not because Sedona is a magical mecca, but because of the efforts over decades by the Sedona Chamber of Commerce and businesses acting independently from both the chamber and the city. Now the city wants to end destination marketing.

Thus it should cut the bed tax, which, by state law can only be used on tourism promotion. Council could repeal this tax and give tourists a break and make our hotels slightly more competi­tive with vacation rentals.

Instead, this council holds on like a rabid pitbull on a toddler making temporary taxes permanent in an effort to squeeze out the city’s last vestiges of working class residents into moving away.

For 20 years, council claims to want more affordable housing for retail workers, police officers, firefighters, teachers and nurses, but clearly that’s just a farce intended to garner votes every two years or keep residents from raising a stink at City Council meet­ings. Council is willing to parasitize a single affordable housing project as the Great Win of the Century, while not supporting any projects that catch a whiff of NIMBY stink.

With tens of millions of dollars in this budget, if council really wanted to fix the affordable housing problem, it could buy 10 single-family homes at market price, knock them down and build an dense apartment complex for 50 families.

Instead the wealthy retirocracy votes meeting after meeting how to spend money on window dressing projects: Council created a Sustainable Tourism Plan that dumber members of council stupidly pretend was the dream of the Sedona Chamber of Commerce, rather than its own former city manager.

Or council drafts a Climate Action Plan that has zero metrics but is filled with buzzwords, nonsense and DEI platitudes because of all the warm fuzzies it generates for current council members and their campaign donors.

Before residents need diversity training and inclusion, they need a damn apartment.

Council is ready to dump money into wild, overpriced, useless and pointless projects just because it has $105 million burning a hole. Could was so preoccupied with whether they could spend, they didn’t stop to think if they should.

Christopher Fox Graham

Managing Editor