The Sedona City Council voted unanimously last week to spend $3.46 million on a new sidewalk to connect Tlaquepaque to Tlaquepaque North and the Center for the New Age underneath State Route 179.
The sidewalk is supposed to encourage tourists going from the south side of State Route 179 to the north side to use the underpass rather than the crosswalk in the middle of the block, which causes backups on northbound State Route 179 as far south as Poco Diablo and southbound on State Route 179 to eastbound State Route 89A and as far west as Airport Road.
The underpass sidewalk was touted as supposedly being the great fix that would finally alleviate traffic backups by taking pedestrians off the state highway and shoving them underneath the road to get to the other side. But the Arizona Department of Transportation, which owns State Route 179, has stated unequivocally it will not remove the crosswalk, negating the underpass’s raison d’être.
Once ADOT said “Um, nah” to eliminating the crosswalk, the underpass sidewalk should have been canceled as a fruitless endeavor.
But like all sacred cows that perpetuate themselves as government zombie projects — not because of any usefulness but due to the sunk-cost fallacy — no city staffers nor Sedona residents with council members’ ears appear to be brave enough to tell Sedona’s elected leaders that the underpass will be a colossal waste of money with no perceptible benefit. The appropriate measurement of success would have been actual use of the future sidewalk, but that was not a measurement council thought was worth considering.
Tourists meandering from Tlaquepaque to Tlaquepaque North and back will see a choice between a crosswalk immediately in front of them and a path leading down the hill and under the highway into the shadows — to what can only appear to most visitors from major cities to be Sedona’s “Stab Alley” — and opt for the crosswalk. Forcing a few hundred cars to stop for 30 seconds with a clear line of sight and only a few dozen feet to walk is preferable to the dark scary place that starts around the corner.
Even if ADOT should eliminate the crosswalk, jaywalkers will still cross at that spot like they did before Tlaquepaque North was built, unless the city and ADOT put up an anti-pedestrian barrier like the one in Uptown.
The money that will be spent to build this sidewalk is part of our tax dollars — it is the public’s money, and council members are supposed to be accountable for ensuring that this money is spent appropriately. Instead, council is allocating $3.46 million of those taxpayer dollars for an underpass no one will use except as a novelty, except perhaps Sedona’s transients, who will be able to find refuge from inclement weather there when it is not underwater.
Maybe tourists will take photos of the creek under the bridge with a retaining wall backdrop?
Maybe the city can promote #whatsunderthebridge on Instagram?
As the underpass, according to city staff, apparently won’t do much good to actually alleviate traffic, city council could have spent that $3.46 million building a new connector road between State Route 179 and Brewer Road, or between Uptown and the Soldier Pass area, giving residents an alternate route to take pressure off the Y roundabout.
It’s astounding that a council that micromanaged the annual allocation of $600,000 for destination marketing to the Sedona Chamber of Commerce to attract tourists to spend millions of dollars in our restaurants, businesses and hotels would dump $3.46 million willy-nilly into dirt and stone under an overpass that 99.9% of Sedona’s tourists will never set foot on.
The underpass was originally budgeted to cost around $2 million, but somehow that has ballooned to nearly $3.5 million. The first question fiscally responsible Sedona residents should ask is how the cost could swell by 175% to $3,461,567.
The second is how one of the vendors, Standard Construction, could come up with what it thought was a low bid of $5,922,708. We journalists are in the wrong business. Heck, I could figure out how to build a sidewalk if the city gave me nearly $6 million to do it.
We’re lucky that residents were so adamantly against the Uptown parking garage, or that equally pointless money hole would be breaking ground right now at a cost of $13 million or more*.
We’re more flabbergasted that most council members scoffed and lamented that they “didn’t have to spend” $3.46 million. They said it was irresponsible and too costly. Yet they voted for it unanimously anyway.
Wiser politicians who claimed to be “fiscally responsible” during the council discussion would have voted “no,” knowing they would lose the vote but could still claim to be good stewards of our tax dollars. That way, a project from the previous administration that should have been killed and buried might finally have died a deserved death. Instead, this zombie project will crawl on and few will ever set foot on it.
Christopher Fox Graham
Managing Editor
* from “Council shifts gears, putting Uptown garage into park … for now”: “When the garage was first looked at years ago, the original anticipated cost was about $11 million. After evaluating designs and bringing on additional engineers, as well as adjusting for inflation and soaring material costs, the construction cost is currently estimated to be around $16 million, with a maximum project bid that sits at $18 million.”
