At the Sedona City Council meeting on Tuesday, June 11, council members discussed and agreed to support any number of crossings over Oak Creek both inside and outside Sedona city limits.

We commend council for reigniting the discussion on providing alternate routes among the Village of Oak Creek, east Sedona and West Sedona.

Right now, all resident visitor traffic on the left bank and right bank of Oak Creek must cross the two-lane bridge near Tlaquepaque or drive through Cornville to cross along Page Springs Road. This chokepoint in Sedona not only creates congestion during periods of high traffic volume, but also throughout the week regardless of the circumstances.

When there’s heavy pedestrian traffic crossing at Tlaquepaque or looky-loo tourists on State Route 179 who don’t know where they’re going, this congestion backs up traffic to the Y roundabout and well down State Route 179, often to the Poco Diablo area, sometimes even further south to the edge of Sedona city limits.

In November 2015 we published a two-page spread titled “A Comprehensive List of Potential Improvements to Fix Sedona Traffic,” which identified a host of ways to reduce congestion, much of which the city duplicated in the Sedona in Motion program — widening State Route 89A in Uptown, adding an anti-jaywalking fence, building a parking garage west of Jordan, creating one-way roads in Uptown and building a detour to Jordan Road at the north end of Uptown, which was later fulfilled by the city as Owenby Way.

In this plan, we also identified three sites where new bridges or crossings could be built, including at the former low-water crossing that gave Red Rock Crossing its name.

Yavapai County was granted a U.S. Forest Service permit to rebuild the all-low-water Red Rock Crossing after the last spring flood washed it out, but the permit expired before any work was commissioned. But that lack of work does not preclude the city of Sedona and Yavapai County from working with the USFS on any number of possible crossings if elected officials and the governments they lead pushed for a renewal.

While we published this page after I became Larson Newspapers’ managing editor in 2013, my previous managing editors — Greg Ruland, Trista Steers-McVittie, John Walsh and Ryan van Benthuysen — had all long advocated for the need for an alternate route, as did longtime editor Tom Brossert.

Point being, the need is nothing new.

In reality, public funds and public will channeled through elected officials could build bridges or low-water crossings. It’s not an impossibility; after all, there are two bridges and nine low-water crossings in Oak Creek Canyon, and three bridges and one low-water crossing over Oak Creek between State Route 179 and Page Springs Road.

On Tuesday, Sedona City Council discussed multiple potential crossing locations where a crossing could be constructed, inside Sedona city limits, between Sedona and county parcels or wholly on county-owned land, in which case a project could be supplementally funded by the city. The city has spent roughly $50 million on land and capital improvements in the last two years, so spending more on a bridge or crossing to benefit us all is certainly not outside the realm of possibility.

Sedona City Council must do what is best for the residents of the city of Sedona regardless of potential opposition from those outside the city, and we wholeheartedly encourage it to pursue such a project to reduce traffic backups on State Route 179, which are not only detrimental to Sedona’s economy but are an ongoing and permanent hassle for parents driving their kids to and from West Sedona School, patients desperate for emergency care at the Sedona Emergency Center, or residents who endure backups that turn State Route 179 into a parking lot. Funding can easily be supplemented by state or federal funds.

After all, the federal government was willing to pay $25 million for Verde Connect, a road very few people actually wanted, to connect Cornville Road with the rural Middle Verde area of Camp Verde.

Surely federal or state funds for a more desirable and effective road connecting the Village of Oak Creek to West Sedona would be easier to acquire.

We commend council for taking the first steps toward construction of such a roadway, or roadways to provide a release valve for our endless traffic congestion.

Depending on what happens in the elections in July and November, we encourage the incoming Yavapai County Board of Supervisors to take the Sedona City Council’s lead and work to secure county, state or federal funds in furtherance of such a project, which is long overdue.

It’s clearly needed by residents in Sedona, in the Village of Oak Creek and the region at large.

Christopher Fox Graham

Managing Editor