As the Arizona legislative session lumbers onward with all the grace of an armadillo crossing a hot desert, Sedona’s City Council and city staff have continued to advocate for legislation that will “support the city’s agenda,” Deputy City Manager Joanne Keene said.

However, most of the bills which council members and staffers have stated they would like to see advance are stalled in the legislative process, while bills they opposed are advancing.

Hoping for Housing

House Bill 2047, sponsored by Arizona Rep. Selena Bliss [R-District 1], would have permitted communities with populations under 17,000 to regulate short-term rentals as transient lodging and limit their numbers. After the bill died in committee in early March, Sedona Mayor Scott Jablow and Lake Havasu Mayor Cal Sheehy paid a personal call on Speaker of the House Ben Toma [R-District 27] to discuss the STR problem.

“He was very gracious in giving us his time,” Jablow told the city council on March 14, adding that he presented Toma with letters from the Sedona Fire District, the Sedona-Oak Creek School District, Northern Arizona Healthcare and local businesses testifying to their difficulties in finding employees due to the housing shortage.

“What I came away with [was that] … Speaker Toma has ties to family members with short-term rentals. He’s a realtor,” Jablow said. He then suggested that Toma’s brother owned a local resort before being corrected by Keene.

“What really was impactful, and he was very clear, was that himself and his chief of staff … Michael [Hunter], helped craft the original short-term rental bill,” Jablow said of 2016’s Senate Bill 1350. “So they have a stake in seeing 1350 move forward and not be touched. Oh, and Michael [Hunter] came from the Goldwater Institute.”

The Goldwater Institute sued the town of Jerome in 2016 on behalf of Jerome resident Glenn Odegard over its short-term rental ban. The passage of SB1350 nullified the lawsuit.

Jablow said, “The speaker was pretty clear that he was part of the crafting.”

Keene said it was her understand that Toma had not been involved in drafting SB1350, but Jablow responded, “Thanks for clarifying that, either way, the fact [is that] his chief of staff, Michael [Hunter] was.”

Andrew Wilder, director of communications for the House Republican majority caucus, confirmed that Toma was not involved in the creation of SB1350 and did not begin serving in the legislature until 2017.

“It was a good give-and-take discussion, so I’m hoping that moving forward something will change,” Jablow concluded.

Meanwhile, Keene reached out to Arizona Sen. Ken Bennett [R-District 1] to ask him to oppose SB1117, which would have prohibited municipalities from establishing excessive parking and lot size or margin requirements for zoning and required them to approve all applications for rezoning property to residential within 30 days if the application was administratively complete. The bill was subsequently amended to apply only to communities with a population of 30,000 or greater.

At the March 28 city council meeting, Keene also asked the council to oppose HB2536, which would allow cities and towns to create self-certification code compliance programs for architects and engineers and allow for expedited building permit review, and to support SB1585, which would appropriate $145 million from the general fund to the state’s homeless shelter fund. Council agreed with both staff recommendations.

HB2536 passed the House 60-0 at its third reading and passed out of the Senate rules committee on March 22.

SB1585 passed the Senate 18-11 on March 21 and is now under consideration by the House.

Public Records

HB2808, which originally required public bodies to turn over public records within five business days and would have penalized them for noncompliance, is advancing in the legislature in spite of Sedona’s opposition.

“We’re still trying to muddle through this and figure out what problem we’re trying to solve with this bill. We have opposed it,” Keene told the council on March 14.

Noting that HB2808 had passed the House by 57-0, “clearly people think that this is a good bill and that it’s a necessary bill,” Keene said. “We don’t think it really does anything … obviously our two members of our legislative delegation think that it’s solving a problem we don’t have.” Bliss and Arizona Rep. Quang Nguyen [R-District 1] represent the Sedona area in the House.

HB2808 was intended to solve a lack of clarity in Arizona law about how fast agencies must provide public records.

The Arizona Court of Appeals ruled in Phoenix New Times v. Arpaio in 2008 that a delay of 34 business days in providing documents did not meet the statutory requirement that they be provided “promptly,” but did not set a time limit for official promptitude.

HB2808 would have clarified this omission, but the version of the bill passed by the House struck out the original time limit of five days and the amended time limit of 15 days to require only that public bodies provide a receipt for the records request within five days, rendering the bill a dead letter.

The city of Sedona has also supported SB1006, which as written would have permitted the city to publish public notices only on its website but has since been amended to apply only to counties with a population of more than 4 million people — only Maricopa County is that size.

Keene told the council, “We’re really interested in making sure that we’re included,” and the city’s lobbyist was pursuing an amendment at the time. SB1006 passed the Senate 16-13 and passed out of the House rules committee unanimously on March 27.

Grocery Tax

HB2061 would have repealed the sales tax on food for home consumption, saving Arizonans an estimated $182.9 million in fiscal year 2024 alone. The bill, which Sedona officials opposed on the grounds that it “erodes the authority that we have,” was replaced with the substitute bill SB1063, which passed the Senate 16-13 on Feb. 27, passed the House 31-29 on March 22 and was vetoed by Gov. Katie Hobbs on March 28.

Hobbs’ nine-line veto memo claimed that the bill would lead to cuts in public services and increased property taxes without mitigating the effects of inflation and that it was insufficient because it provided no added benefits to food stamp recipients.

“Great,” Keene said when told about the bill’s failure by members of the council on the evening it was vetoed. She later referred to the veto as “good news.”

“Her veto memo was just, I thought, a really good piece of writing,” Councilwoman Kathy Kinsella said.

HB2094 would prevent cities from prohibiting the operation of mobile food vendors on private property for private events and cap the fees the city could charge them at $50 per year. On March 14, the council had also reviewed HB2094 and agreed to oppose it, at Kinsella’s request.

It passed the House 31-26 on Feb. 28 and the Senate government committee 5-3 on March 22.

Regulations

HB2019 would require municipalities that issue licenses or permits for constitutionally-permitted activities to “specify in clear and unambiguous language the criteria for granting the license or permit.”

Keene referred to it as a “Goldwater bill” on March 14, before saying, “We’re hoping and assuming this bill is dead.”

HB2019 passed the House 55-4 on Feb. 27 and is currently under consideration in the Senate, having passed out of the government committee 5-3 on March 15.

SB1278, which was introduced to establish a housing trust fund, was subsequently amended in the House to strike everything in the original legislation and substitute language recognizing utility customers’ right to own and operate the appliances of their choice and prohibiting city ordinances that would interfere with this right. Keene described the new bill as “a reaction by a think tank to some communities discussing banning natural gas appliances, so this would prohibit us from any kind of regulation of not just gas but other utilities and appliances. Obviously it’s a local control issue.”

Council agreed to oppose the legislation.

The House committee on health and human services reported SB1278 out by 5-4 on March 27 after it passed the Senate unanimously.

On the Road Again

The omnibus transportation spending bill HB2543 passed the House 50-8 on March 8, passed out of the Senate transportation and technology committee by 5-1 on March 27 and is currently awaiting its second reading in the Senate.

The bill includes appropriations for:

• $5,016,000 for distribution to Sedona for roundabout construction and improvements at the intersection of State Route 89A, Forest Road and Ranger Road
• $6,321,360 for distribution to Clarkdale for the Verde Valley rail bridge project
• $4,000,000 for distribution to Cottonwood for Main Street pavement rehabilitation
• $15,668,929 for improvements to State Route 89, including construction of a roundabout in Chino Valley

The omnibus transport bill replaces HB2097, which would have appropriated $18.4 million for State Route 89 improvements, and HB2098 and SB1169, which originally appropriated funding for the Clarkdale bridge and passed the House 34-26 and the Senate 23-5.

Planning to Succeed

Members of the council expressed displeasure at the failure of HB2044, which would have allowed the city to submit its updated community plan to the voters for approval. HB2044 passed the House 56-0 on Feb. 20 but has since been stalled in the Senate due to the refusal of the chairman of the committee on government, Sen. Jake Hoffman [R-District 12], to put it on the agenda for a hearing.

“He’s not a fan of local government,” Keene said of Hoffman, adding that “the only thing we have heard is concern about what’s included in the general plan … clearly there was something in there he didn’t like.”

“One individual with an agenda against local government is able to squash this,” Kinsella said. “He’s one person that is killing something for our municipality of 9,000-plus people … This is the anti-public agenda that is coming out of some legislators.”

“It’s actually ludicrous, and there’s no reason except he doesn’t want to,” Councilwoman Jessica Williamson said.

Vice Mayor Holli Ploog encouraged residents to write to Hoffman to “express their disdain.”

Local Control

The most frequent argument for opposing legislation that Keene has advanced over the past month has been the need for the city to maintain “local control.” Many of the bills the city has opposed would have restricted the city’s regulatory ability, but would also have failed to transfer or allot the regulatory authority to the state. SB1117, HB2536, HB2094 and SB1278, for instance, would have exempted individuals from municipal regulations