Tim Perry: Council admits defeat on initiative ~ ‘Deeply Unpopular’

Tim Perry: Council admits defeat on initiative ~ ‘Deeply Unpopular’

After yielding to the public will in the matter of the Cultural Park, for the moment at any rate, the council had to reassert themselves by approving the first round of contracts and a tentative fee schedule for Uptown paid parking in the face of near-unanimous opposition and distrust from the public, which came on top of a previous survey that also reported near-unanimous opposition to staff’s proposals among Uptown residents.

Council and staff devoted an appreciable amount of time to whining about what they referred to as “misinformation” among residents with regard to parking without referring to any specific piece of alleged misinformation as an example. Comrade Dickey claimed that “it appears intentional” and then added that the members of the parking work group were either mistaken or lying in their comments to staff. The discussion was a perfect illustration of why council and staff are literally psychopaths. They were again unable to understand that the public had given them an unambiguous “no” on pursing this program and were attempting to rationalize that answer into a “yes” by dismissing the public’s comments as uninformed.

Staff’s proposed fee structure will see spaces in the garage priced at $3.50 per hour during peak season—March through May and September through November—and $2.50 per hour during off-peak times. For metered spaces along SR 89A, the rates will double during off-peak season to $4 per hour and increase further during peak season to $5 per hour. Comparable increases for the intermediate lots would see spaces go as high as $9 to $12 per hour during peak season, while the main lot would have the same prices as the garage. Staff are explicitly trying to use the pricing structure to manipulate the local parking market in order to force visitors into the garage and onto the failing transit system. It’s the sort of move that makes residents think the city is indeed more interested in tourists than residents. They also think they can snare an additional $1.1 million to $1.7 million in revenue each year from creating or increasing fees for surface parking in order to cover any cost overruns from the garage.

Instead of going to just one vendor, staff’s largesse will be spread out among four different contractors, who will all provide competing and contradictory apps with which city staff will attempt to mismanage parking. Staff have excelled themselves in this case with the speed of their bureaucratization and their rush to establish preexisting relationships before a possible no vote on home rule could take their budgets away. All these systems are expected to cost $273,719 this year and between $70,000 and $80,000 in future years. Implementation is expected by mid-July.

Meanwhile, the average parking rate in Uptown has declined from 76 percent in 2023 to, according to staff’s latest findings, 65 percent. No mention was made of the decline, which would have impaired the narrative that Uptown is being overrun with irresponsible parkers, primarily tourists, and that the city must swoop in to save the Good Sedonans.

Public comment on the fees and overall proposal was substantially unfavorable, with residents zeroing in on the manner in which the proposals would exclude employees from Uptown.

“The excessive rates make Sedona less affordable for those who live here,” Rob Smith said, pointing out that the proposed fees would cost someone over a hundred dollars a week to park in Uptown. He then urged the council to “make parking a break-even endeavor rather than a profit center.”

“They can’t afford to pay those kind of rates, and we really don’t want to lose them to working in Cottonwood,” Dave Swartout of Sedona Off-Road Center informed the council with regard to employees. “Some of these smaller stores, retailers, are barely making it now, so they can’t afford to subsidize the parking either.”

“I’m convinced that a lot of people in Sedona that live in Uptown do not know this is happening. It’s received very scant publicity…it’s being presented as a fait accompli,” David Foster declared. Noting that the Uptown garage had incurred “enormous cost overruns” and that “there was no compelling reason to build this structure,” he predicted that “people are going to see that the desire of the city council is to monetize this asset,” which staff would do by attempting to force drivers to use the garage. “You’re on the cusp of abolishing free public parking in Uptown Sedona,” Foster summarized, describing the plan as an effort to “impose regulatory burdens that are very exacting, very annoying…This is going to be deeply unpopular.”

“There’s a few hundred unaccounted-for people that are working in the area that do not have parking. If everything goes to paid parking, that’s going to be a big challenge,” James Trautman of Pink Jeep said.

“Folks in Uptown are quite concerned about people moving away from the paid parking spaces,” Rich Gay pointed out, as well as referring to public concern “that we may be actually having a reduction in the number of spaces around town.” Concern? It’s not just concern. Comrade Harris still won’t cough up the number of on-street parking spaces the city has destroyed to make room for sidewalks the size of airport runways alone. Go measure the stretches of Soldier Pass Road or Dry Creek Road within city limits and divide by twenty feet to get a rough idea of the number of parking spaces staff have eliminated city-wide. It is completely irrelevant whether there has been an increase in the number of private parking spaces during the last few years that has exceeded the elimination of public spaces. The point here is that our public property, which was formerly available for us to use for its intended purpose, is being taken away to be given to the elite few, rich retirees and tourists, who will use it to our exclusion.

“Doing the quick math on this…it’s going to be about a million dollars per year expense on the employee side for us,” Kevin Picard of L’Auberge told the council. “Take a look at what we’re going to do for employees.”

Comrade Key, whose salary is paid by our tax dollars transferred from the city to the Chamber, claimed that businesses were “anxiously awaiting” the completion of a garage in which their employees would not be able to afford to park. He then claimed that business owners supported the existence of a city transit system because some of their employees were too cowardly to walk three blocks to their cars at night, going so far as to make the outrageous allegation that there were people getting rides to their cars from coworkers—or did he mean to say co-wokers?—because of their degree of paranoia. Where did this detached-from-reality kid come from? He must be dying to get back to a big city where there are streetlights every fifty feet. Good thing he wasn’t here when Comrade Boone was; they’d have got on like a forest on fire with their misrepresentations.

After hearing all the objections, council and staff attempted to temporize before waving the program through. “We’re aware of all those issues. They’re all being discussed,” Comrade Dunn condescendingly dismissed the comments. “We don’t have that worked out yet. It has gone to a subcommittee,” Comrade Fultz cynically told the audience on the topic of employee parking, presumably intending to be reassuring. “We never thought that employees would have to pay these rates,” Comrade Dickey breathlessly assured the council, without providing any details on how he thought that scenario might be averted. He vaguely suggested the city could make a deal to lease private lots—when the owners of multiple private lots in Uptown have already terminated their leases with the city because the city wasn’t paying them nearly enough.

Dickey then embarked on one of the most mendacious performances council has seen in recent years by stating with regard to parking, “We hear a lot of rumors…that there is a net reduction. That is absolutely not the case.” Not only is that statement demonstrably false, Dickey has stated very clearly and publicly on previous occasions that the completion of the garage would indeed be accompanied by lot closures of a greater number of spaces than were to be made available in the garage, creating a net reduction in parking in order to force transit use.

Council finally agreed to accept staff’s proposed rates for the garage, metered parking, and intermediate lots but to defer consideration of fees for the main lot until July; they plan to approve the fees unanimously on June 9.

In council’s newest totalitarian move, Comrade Dunn ended the meeting by proposing a new ordinance to ban us from riding bikes on sidewalks; the item was agendized for a future discussion with the support of Comrades Kinsella and Pfaff. How can it be possible there are so many snowflakes in the desert?

The meeting also saw further protests against the Sedona paramilitary’s misconduct, with Scott Soller ironically reading some of Comrade Santos’s more ridiculous and contradictory quotes from one of his reports. “On the back of Officer Santos’s vehicle, it should say, ‘lunge, control, defeat’,” Soller commented. “I know at least six people personally that have been abused by the police…and they’re afraid to speak.” Rachael Collins stated that her group had reached out to the FBI to seek redress against the Sedona police and city prosecutor Comrade Kunish. “We have no crime in Sedona. The only way the police chief can justify her budget…is by criminalizing us,” Collins declared.