Like many cities of similar size, Sedona has seen the impact of COVID-19 and the drop in local spending, tourism and tax collection over the last seven months. But unlike most, city hall has not seen a decrease in employees and the services they provide.

City Manager Justin Clifton said that while positions have been frozen and vacant for several months, no one has lost their job as a result of the pandemic.

“I’m certainly proud of the fact that because of years of good financial management we were able to deal with revenue shortfalls without layoffs or furloughs,” he said. “Freezing naturally occurring vacancies, and all other discretionary expenditures, has thus far been enough to offset losses.”

Clifton added that what may occur in the upcoming months is anyone’s guess.

“We remain careful because things have changed quickly during the pandemic thus far,” he said. “But I’m reason­ably optimistic that the worst is over and that we’ll continue targeted release of frozen positions and program expenses over the next few months.”

In all, the city had 12 positions that were frozen at least for some extended period of time. Seven of those remain frozen. Two new positions would have been recom­mended in the budget but uncertainly around the progress of COVID-19 caused the city to refrain from allocating those funds, Clifton said.

• Positions that are currently frozen as of this week include: Assistant engineer, assistant city attorney, court clerk, communications and public relations coordinator, economic development vista volunteer, wastewater chief operator and housing manager.
• Positions that had been frozen but are now open include: Associate planner, transit administrator and police officer.
• Positions that were frozen but have since been filled include: Accountant and account technician.
• New positions not budgeted because of COVID: New parks and recreation position and new building inspector position.
• Positions that were filled immediately after their vacancy include: City attorney, court clerk, parks and recreation administrator, public works administrator, wastewater lab technician, traffic control assistant, city maintenance worker, court security officer and police officer cadets.

“I’m sure there were some part-time positions that had hours reduced because workload reduced,” Clifton said. “For instance, in April and May there was much less tourism than normal, reducing the need for Traffic Control Assistants. So their hours were reduced but not so much because we were trimming the budget but because the pandemic affected the need for those services. But there were not other kinds of systematic reduction in hours.”