Late last month, the issue of major v. minor amendments came before the city’s Planning & Zoning Commission, which decided to table the talk until a later time.
This is basically a minor housekeeping issue that would barely appear on anyone’s radar except for the fact that a small faction of the city misread the language and assumed the worst. And by worst, they assumed that all the city’s zoning procedures would be wiped away and residents from Dry Creek to Back O’Beyond would be changing their parcels’ zoning without any notice.
The misinformation spread — apparently, because of an erroneous email sent by a “Bettye,” no surname, whose misinformation appeared in letters to our newspaper and in emails to city staff.
little backstory: Back in autumn 2017, there were four “major community plan amendments” that went before the city of Sedona’s Planning and Zoning Commission and Sedona City Council. By city ordinance under state law, all four had to be heard during this window in the calendar year because they were defined as “major.”
One was a proposed apartment complex on State Route 89A. The second was a proposal by the city of Sedona to allow such apartment complexes, and had to be paired jointly to allow the aforementioned complex.
The third was to allow conversion from residential to “planned area development” of an open parcel on State Route 179 into a parking lot to serve an adjacent business, and the fourth was to allow conversion from residential to “planned area development” to allow a local family that makes juice from their existing apple trees at their home to make hard cider in the same buildings.
The first and third rezoning applications were clearly major adjustments that would redefine the look and feel of adjacent neighborhoods. The hard cider rezoning application was a relatively minor adjustment and limited in scope as it only allowed apple cider production.
While all four were scheduled to go through public hearings before P&Z and City Council, it seemed odd to both residents and city staff that something as intuitively minor as allowing hard cider production in an existing building would require a major plan amendment and thus could only be heard at one window in the year.
After three of four amendments were approved, city staff suggested altering the definition of such proposals from “major” to “minor” so that they could be heard in public by P&Z and council at any time of year and not merely in this one window.
Somehow, “Bettye,” and those who read her erroneous email without checking the allegations she made, incorrectly jumped to the conclusion that if the redefinition passed then anyone could change zoning willynilly without any public process if their parcels were under 5 acres, which is not how the proposal was written, nor what it would do.
Bettye wrote: “It means that city wide, the planning & zoning [commission] want[s] to be able to change zoning on any property under 5 acres, on their desk, without public notice.”
Which is most of the parcels in Sedona.
Which would be insane.
Yet despite that clearly illogical train of thought, some residents didn’t bother to ask critical questions or contact the city for clarification and instead thought this really was a fact. They got all worked up and contacted us and the city demanding that this not be allowed to happen.
The redefintion basically states, “There’s some big stuff and some small stuff we should all talk about as a city. We’ll talk about the big stuff all at once and talk about the little stuff whenever we have free time. Now some of the small stuff got lumped in with the big stuff, so let’s move it officially to the ‘small stuff’ pile, but we’re still going to talk about all of it just like we always do.”
After The Sedona Red Rock News and city staff assured the flustered that they were not reading the proposal’s language correctly, they doubted it wholesale and continued to assume the worst.
We can only do so much to inform, it seems.
The good news, folks, is that if the redefinition passes or not, the disaster “Bettye” fears won’t happen.
No, that’s not what the redefinition asks for. At all. All rezoning will still have to go before Planning and Zoning and Sedona City Council and residents will have weeks or months of public hearings to debate the issue. Our democracy will remain intact.
Christopher Fox Graham
Managing Editor
