On March 11, the Sedona City Council took a positive step toward repairing its relationship with Sedona’s business community and our workers by again funding the Uptown Visitor Center at 80% of its costs and expenses for the second year in a row.

The Sedona Chamber of Commerce’s Board of Directors had decided in April 2023 not to seek a service contract to use bed tax dollars in fiscal year 2023-24. The acrimonious divorce between the city and the chamber that followed seemed to irrevocably damage the longstanding partnership between the city of Sedona and the nonprofit business cooperative, although many in the business community supported removal of city oversight of the private nonprofit’s operations. After all, their missions are not synchronous: The city serves all residents through the use of our tax dollars and the chamber supports member businesses and workers by promoting commercial offerings to residents and visitors. The chamber survives when businesses are successful in their endeavors, staying in business, maintaining their membership and supporting the chamber’s marketing efforts, be they things that target residents, like home repair or services, or things that target tourists, like hotel stays and tours. The city survives by maintaining population and collecting revenue from sales tax — more than 75% of which is paid for by tourists so that we residents don’t need a property tax to pay for roads, facilities and police protection.

As we reported, the Visitor Center’s proposed FY26 contract put the center’s budget at $439,300 with a city contribution of $351,440, funded by the city’s bed tax. To clarify, residents do not pay the bed tax, which is charged to tourists who stay at lodging facilities in city limits. So this money isn’t paid by “us,” the residents, but by visitors. The contract also gave the city the option to renew for FY27 for $358,892.

The Uptown stretch is Sedona’s economic center for most visitors, or at least certainly what they think of first when asked about Sedona’s commercial sector. The Visitor Center is an institution and a landmark that anchors the area, perched on a hill overlooking the gateway to Uptown at Forest Road, and for every visitor turning left at that road to find a parking spot, the Visitor Center it is the pivot point to which visitors look for when arriving in the commercial corridor.

For many visitors, especially international tourists, who seek advice in person when visiting a new town, it’s the first place they stop. It’s also a convenient gathering point for visitors who get separated or who carpool to meet up even if they never set foot inside the building.

Council did the right thing in 2024 by supporting the contract in a 4-3 vote and more so this year by supporting the Visitor Center contract unanimously.

Having met with Chamber President and CEO David Key, we believe the chamber will work with the city and residents to fully repair the relationship after the recent unpleasantness before his hiring. We commend council for supporting the chamber and the Visitor Center.

A bit more dubious is the plan to install kiosks in Uptown to manage tourist behavior. While the concept is sound on its face, the goals are less so. Informational kiosks are great for showing visitors information about a localized area, such as locating a specific business one can’t find or mapping a route back their parking spot, but searching for a Seven Canyons-area trail isn’t really something they’ll do while holding an ice cream and a shopping bag. That’s what smartphones are for.

Tourists who come to Sedona to hike to the Boynton Canyon vortex, Cathedral Rock or Devil’s Bridge, or harder-to-locate places like the Wind Caves or Secret Slickrock Trail already searched for these sites before arriving.

The largest Sedona tourism page on Facebook has 349,600 active members as of March 26, and these users are asking other tourists and residents how to get to certain trails. Some users post their whole itineraries and ask for advice.

Regardless of the city’s goal to shift tourists away from popular locations, people will find a way to the spots they saw on social media — that’s how the unmarked “Subway Cave” became Sedona’s newest must-see location. A long Sedona hike isn’t something visitors plan on the fly after lunch in Uptown — it’s a destination they’ve mapped out before arriving at their hotel.

Most know there’s an hour-long wait at Devil’s Bridge to take a photo while pretending there aren’t 200 people queueing behind the photographer, which still isn’t a deterrent, so a kiosk in Uptown won’t have the intended effect no matter how pretty the screen may be. If the city convinces AllTrails to shut off that trail map for a few hours, there is Reddit, hundreds of other apps, static websites and physical maps hikers will use to get their coveted Instagram pic on the bridge, just like the 1,000 other people that morning.

Ultimately, the kiosks will help visitors duplicate what their smartphones can do but are very unlikely to alter how tourists plan their visit.