The Sedona Community Forum returned to the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at the Yavapai College Sedona Center on Wednesday, Jan. 25, with a talk by Sedona Mayor Scott Jablow on affordable housing and the redevelopment of the Sedona Cultural Park.

The city recently purchased the 41-acre site for an estimated $24 million.

Jablow repeatedly emphasized that the public outreach process for the Cultural Park’s redevelopment has yet to begin.

“We want to do outreach to you, to the public,” Jablow said. “We want to hear your ideas.”

“We’re going to form a committee that will be staff-driven, and the committee will do outreach, the city staff will do outreach,” Jablow explained about how the planning process will work. “We’re going to figure out what we want before we decide what it’s going to look like.”

At the same time, Jablow indicated that the city has already decided on the primary use of the property.

“We’re going to do workforce housing there,” Jablow told the audience. “Workforce housing will be the No. 1 thing. Everything else is optional.”

In response to a question on how many housing units the Cultural Park could accommodate, Jablow was unable to provide an approximate figure, referring instead to Cottonwood’s recent expansion of its city borders and a project there to build “hundreds of workforce housing units.”

“We can’t do that here,” he commented.

According to Cultural Park architect Dan Jensvold, the area of the arts village that he and his partner Stephen Thompson had designed for the southern portion of the site would have been able to accommodate a couple of hundred housing units. If the festival grounds and indoor performing arts center formerly planned for the park were to be replaced or supplemented with smaller housing villages, the number of units that could fit on the land would likely double.

Some 200 housing units with an average size of 300 square feet — which would meet the city’s definition of micro-units as considered in its affordable housing action plan — would occupy less than one and a half acres. If these units were to be clustered in two-story buildings, they would take up half that space. 200 one-story units plus 200 two-story units would cover just two acres of ground — 5% of the land area of the Cultural Park.

Jablow also indicated that the Cultural Park will be privately managed.

“We would have a company do that, of course,” he said. “The land would be owned by the city, and we would lease the project to somebody in a public-private partnership.”

Later, Jablow mentioned the possibility of a similar arrangement with a music industry professional who had contacted him about developing a new venue at the Cultural Park.

“He would rent the land,” Jablow specified. “It would be a land lease.”

Asked for his thoughts on a public-private partnership with a nonprofit organization to develop and manage the Cultural Park, Jablow said, “I’m open to anything. We just need to do something for workforce housing. If that’s an answer, and it works out, that’s fine.”

The use of public-private partnerships to further affordable housing development in Sedona has been a recurring theme for city officials. During his mayoral campaign, Jablow called for more public-private partnerships, such as the Sunset Lofts project, and at the city council retreat last week, city Housing Manager Shannon Boone spoke of the city’s urgent desire to partner with additional nonprofit developers if possible.

“She does have a lot of applications from publicprivate partnerships,” Jablow noted.

As for the additional uses to which the Cultural Park might be put, Jablow mentioned a variety of suggestions that have been made to him so far.

“We want to have open space,” he told his listeners. “I want to keep as much open space so there are paths that we can walk through … Whatever we can pull together without overbuilding the land.”

“Some people suggest rebuilding the event venue,” Jablow continued. “OK, I don’t know if that’s the best thing to do, but if that’s people’s opinion, I want to hear.”

The city of Sedona currently plans to spend $2 million per year on developing the Cultural Park beginning in fiscal year 2026, or calendar July 2025.

For comparison, Jensvold and Thompson estimated that renovating the Frontiere Pavilion, repairing the roads, rebuilding the bathrooms, replacing the damaged infrastructure and bringing the Cultural Park back to a condition in which it could host a major music festival would cost $5 million total.

Simply replacing the stage flooring, Thompson said — which, combined with cleaning up the brush in the amphitheater, would give the pavilion the ability to host community events and performances again — would cost about $50,000.

Jablow then mentioned the unnamed music industry figure who had approached him, who he claimed is interested in building “a small auditorium, similar to across the street at the high school.”

“He’s heavily connected to the music industry,” Jablow said, again without naming the person. “He would bring top-rated music artists here.”

As the Frontiere Pavilion, with 5,350 seats, and the Sedona Performing Arts Center, with 750 seats, both already offer, or could offer, substantial facilities to visiting artists, it is not clear how building a third facility within a few minutes’ walk of the others would be a fiscally sensible or environmentally friendly decision.

“Someone has approached me who wants to build a botanical garden there,” Jablow offered further. He pointed out that the Cultural Park is already connected to the city’s wastewater plant to receive treated water suitable for gardening. “We could have a botanical garden and we wouldn’t be taking water from the aquifers.”

Less artistically, Jablow considered the possibility that high-density residential buildings could be constructed in the bowl currently occupied by the amphitheater, as they could then be built three or four stories tall while remaining largely unseen.

One member of the audience made a strong case for “having arts and culture, community gathering places, available on the Cultural Park land. I think you can do that along with the affordable housing.

“We’ve been working since 2012 to have an art museum here,” she continued. “Sedona is always saying they’re a city animated by the arts … Our community would be enhanced by having something other than workforce housing, something that the whole community can enjoy.”

“That is a topic that is near and dear to me,” Jablow said of the proposal for an art museum. He added that there were organizations that had raised money for the purpose years previously, “but they couldn’t find the land to build an art museum. What a great idea. Well, if we have land at the Cultural Park, why not put it out there?” Jablow also hinted at the possibility of an archaeological center in combination with the art museum. However, any of these projects could take a decade or more to be completed once the final selection is made.

“The Cultural Park may be five years out,” Jablow said.