Lots of people make annual New Year’s resolutions starting on Jan. 1, such as saving money, doing more volunteering, losing weight, spending more time with family, eliminating a vice or reducing a bad habit. Some of these are easier to achieve and last all year, while others fall by the wayside within the first week.
If you do indeed want to help your community more, we highly recommend making a resolution to run for public office.
Serving your neighbors is a civic duty and not nearly as difficult as one might think. While most of our current council members are retirees without children at home who haven’t run businesses in years, or ever, Sedona City Council members in years past have been parents with kids at home or small business owners who understand what it’s like to raise a family here or run a small business in our tourist-driven market while still making time to go to biweekly council meetings and work sessions. Service means a few hours of meetings in the middle of the week and weekends that are largely free.
If you’ve lived Sedona longer than a year and think you have good ideas to improve our quality of life, you are wholly eligible to run.
If you’ve been agitated by Sedona’s perennial traffic problems, remembering the good old days when you could drive up State Route 179 on a Saturday afternoon at the speed limit, find parking at a trailhead or hire employees who could afford to live in Sedona without a trust fund or a side hustle or an OnlyFans account and think you have a solution to help, by all means step into the ring.
If you spent any time in traffic in the last two years and complained about it online or to neighbors, if you want to see State Route 179 widened and alternate routes built or other actions taken to reduce the ridiculous traffic congestion caused by two decades of inept leadership, then by all means run for office and vow to work with state and county officials to complete these projects.
If you have a vision for how Sedona should be run, have some courage to say, “This insanity ends now — and it ends with me.”
Reading our stories, you can see that council rarely has any dissent — votes are almost always unanimous and occasionally 6-1, if one council member has a quibble. In the last year, by our account, there have been fewer than five 4-3 or 5-2 votes, which were mainly due to zone change requests or funding of Sedona Chamber of Commerce projects. Yet members still pontificate for hours for the cameras, thinking aloud in real time, never trying to convince anyone else on the dais, all voting in lockstep.
Submissive conformity without dissent is a failure of liberal democracy.
Sedona tends to have a few more candidates running than the number of seats available, but rarely is there any diversity of class, age, family status, wealth or ethnicity, which reinforces the myopic, homogeneous views of a single political clique that is blind to the concerns, values or views of others, especially the poor and working class living paycheck to paycheck while council spends thousands on studies to learn what they could find out for free by talking to waiters, cooks, retail clerks, working parents, students or longtime residents whose first language was Spanish.
Considering the ideological split in our electorate and the fact that many residents are clearly unhappy with council votes, we should have a robust and diverse council.
If you’re in this minority or believe you speak for a silent majority, then you have an obligation to your values and your neighbors to run for elected office.
The city of Cottonwood, which is 50% bigger than Sedona and has twice our budget, has the opposite problem. Too few candidates run for office, so anyone who runs gets a seat, leaving the current council with one official who barely understands how meetings operate and who has threatened to sue colleagues to get failed ordinances passed, another who won as a late-entry write-in and a third who admitted to sexual misconduct and sexual harassment of female city staffers and whom his colleagues refuse to condemn for fear of losing a voting majority.
Surely the voters of the Verde Valley — Sedona, Cottonwood, Clarkdale, Jerome and Camp Verde — deserve a diversity of thoughts, backgrounds and ideas.
There are residents like you, reading this editorial, vowing to get more involved in the community and choosing to serve.
Candidates have until Monday, April 8, to collect signatures and a minimum of only 287 are required.
Campaigns can be run on the cheap for a few thousand dollars, and there are plenty of donors willing to give to have a better community.
We will be interviewing candidates for our schedule once they have declared in order to give everyone a voice. Coupled with ads in our newspaper, a simple website and good ideas, it’s easy for a good candidate — like you — to get elected.
