The city of Sedona has redesignated the Sedona Cultural Park as the Cultural Park Recreational Facility and posted new signs at the park giving its hours of operation as 5 a.m. to 10 p.m.

“It’s considered a park,” Director of Public Works Kurt Harris explained. “It’s been an ongoing policy to try to post park hours, that’s usually daylight to sunset unless otherwise posted, to try to keep that issue at bay so we don’t have visitors or other people thinking, oh, this is a good place to park … It’s one of those things that we’ve got to try to keep people using it for daytime use. It’s not for camping.”

Harris said the decision to post the signs was made as a result of the city receiving “all kinds of complaints for police to enforce illegal camping … It’s not to deter people if they’re actually having a legitimate use of it and so on, so there will still be people, if they want to stargaze and so on, as long as they’re not overtly camping. That was the intent.”

“A lot of it, too, was people who were abusing the recycling bins, throwing garbage in there, or throwing out the recycled items and so on, so we’re trying to police that,” Harris added.

In response to a request for an exemption from the city’s anti-camping ordinance, City Attorney Kurt Christianson stated in February 2021 that “sleeping in a car is not safe due to the heightened risks of robbery or injury in a car accident, or healthy given the extreme hot and cold temperatures that can occur in Sedona and the risks of carbon monoxide poisoning when using a stationary motor vehicle during these times.”

According to Christianson, the decision to install the signs came from the Sedona City Manager’s Office.

The recent closure of some of the parking areas at the Cultural Park, however, was not the result of city staff’s efforts to eliminate decriminalized camping on public property.

“Those were all part of our agreement with the Forest Service, who have a big plan to develop the trailhead site … They were going to put bathrooms there and do a whole bunch of improvements to that trailhead,” Harris said. “So we put those boulders up to try to get people not to trespass or four-wheel around it and to stay within the parking areas, to basically designate the use areas, which is the trailhead parking and so on … We’re trying to work hand in hand with the Forest Service on what their plans are … What’s yet to be determined is if the Forest Service are going to put other types of signing on their federal property, no camping limit.”

“We are in the beginning stages of the design for this trailhead,” Coconino National Forest public affairs officer Brady Smith said. “The purpose of this project is to upgrade the current limited infrastructure and facilities that service the Girdner Trail System and paved Centennial Loop trail, to provide facilities commensurate with a large hub trailhead. There will be improved parking, interpretive signage, vault toilets.”

“Yeah, [it would] probably be a good idea,” Harris said when asked about removing the remaining “no trespassing” signs installed at the park by the previous private owner, Mike Tennyson, of South Dakota, who owned it from 2004 to 2022. “We don’t want people to recreate within the park itself based upon the hazards there, based upon the man-made structures, so we have to work that out, but that’s a good plan.”

“Me personally, I don’t have a big problem [with people recreating there] as long as they’re not trashing it or vandalizing,” Harris said.

City Council members and City Manager Karen Osburn stated at the time of the park’s purchase that the city would do extensive public outreach prior to making any decisions regarding the park’s future.

No public meetings or outreach efforts dealing with the park’s future uses have been held so far. In the city’s fiscal year 2024 budget survey, the option to retain the park as open space received the highest score, while reopening the park as a performance venue received the largest plurality of written comments in support.

The architects and engineers of the Georgia Frontiere Performing Arts Pavilion notified the city in March that the pavilion was still structurally sound and posed no risk to the community. There is also an uninspected storage building located within the park.