The results are in on Proposition 483, a referendum on the city of Sedona’s “Safe Place to Park” homeless worker car camp.
The referendum succeeded, with the “no” vote overwhelmingly rebuking the “yes” vote that would have permitted the Sedona City Council to continue work on the car camp located within the northwest corner of the Sedona Cultural Park.
Council floated the idea for the car camp late in 2023. In January, city of Sedona workers under the direction of the former city manager began work on the site before council formally voted to approve construction on the project.
Those results were definitive, with about two thirds of Sedona voters rejecting the City Council’s move:
Unlike other elections in Arizona and across the country that were decided largely along partisan lines with slim margins of victory, it’s hard to look at this proposition through a partisan lens, given the scale of the council’s defeat.
Perhaps voters were angered that the city began work before council’s approval, or perhaps there is a NIMBY element opposed to any sort of official, government-sanctioned camp designated by city leaders for Sedona’s homeless, both of which could have been factors in the outcome.
Still others are rightly angered that the Sedona City Council opted to build a parking lot for our homeless and working poor, rather than affordable housing, which the current mayor and City Council members have long promised would be coming within months of — not the 2024 primary election, but the election in 2022. Yet no such affordable housing has been built, nor has any such project broken ground, although council continues to assure us, it is still coming … someday.
The council could simply decriminalize car camping on public property in city limits or in certain areas and provide a de facto “safe place to park” homeless worker parking lot elsewhere in the city without the investment of city resources to build structures and monitor the site for nefarious “ne’er-do-wells” at the Sedona Cultural Park, or use a vacant city-owned building. But such an easy solution never occurred to any members of council, who instead opted for something that they could throw millions of taxpayer dollars at in order to hide Sedona’s homeless workers out in the boonies behind a hill where they wouldn’t have to be seen.
Council could then pat themselves on the back for giving the working poor a place to park without being harassed and assuage the city of the guilt of not building any workforce housing for workers anywhere else in the city. Granted, such a site would not have the promised bathrooms and showers, which council could have provided at lower cost.
Legally speaking, the referendum only reversed council’s March 12 vote, but a restart seems politically unlikely, given the overwhelming rebuke at the polls.
It’s not clear how many homeless workers would have used the site anyway, given the restrictions on check-in times, quasi-government monitoring of activities, the inability to run a car engine for heat or air conditioning and the compulsion to register with the nonprofit monitoring the site.
Sedona’s homeless residents and transient workforce have long lived off the grid, on private property or U.S. Forest Service lands for decades, and many would still do so even if the car camp had been approved.
Hopefully this sudden but inevitable defeat will teach Sedona City Council members to listen more carefully to their constituents, Sedona voters and the workforce Council members have long lived in an ideological silo, rarely speaking with working-class residents and instead echoing the talking points of partisan political clubs, repeating comments made in emails by those who reach out to the council first and listening to the handful of residents who can afford the time to attend Sedona City Council meetings, which are scheduled in the middle of the week during regular business hours, when most of Sedona’s fulltime workers are still toiling away at their jobs so they can pay rent.
It’s hard to gauge public opinion of the electorate or the city when retirees are the only ones at City Council meetings.
Working parents have to make special arrangements to attend meetings when there is a topic of interest to them, but most simply don’t bother, because decades of councils that have ignored their concerns have taught them City Council won’t listen anyway.
Silenced by politicians’ indifference, they still vote and make their voices heard at the ballot box.
The voters have spoken, and it’s now up to council to learn the lesson voters have so clearly taught them.
We can hope that council will redouble its efforts to build the affordable housing long-promised during their election campaigns, rather than toying with stopgap measures that do little good to those most affected by high rents and housing costs, a lack of housing options and economic disparity affecting a community where housing prices have doubled in the last decade while real wages have only risen a sliver.
