Every four years, Sedona residents get to vote on home rule during the primary election, which determines how the city will be funded–and how big its government will continue to grow–as a result of the funding mechanism that voters approve.

Small-Town Sedona urges voters to vote no on home rule, which will appear on the July 21 ballot as a choice between “extending the alternative expenditure limit (home rule option)”, or a yes vote on home rule, and “not allowing the City of Sedona to extend the alternative expenditure limitation (home rule option)”, or a no vote on home rule.

To download a presentation covering the problems with home rule for Sedona, click here.

What Is Home Rule?

In 1980, Arizona voters realized that their local governments were spending far too much money, and so the state’s residents approved an amendment to the constitution that capped municipal spending at a fixed level, known as the state expenditure limitation or state baseline. The expenditure limit would increase over time to account for changes in inflation and population, but was intended to keep local government small and lean.

However, the legislation that created the expenditure limit also created two methods by which a local government could establish an alternative expenditure limitation, which are known as a permanent base adjustment and home rule, by persuading local voters to authorize one alternative or the other during a general election:

• A permanent base adjustment, as its name suggests, permanently adjusts the expenditure limit upwards for a municipality to accommodate its increased spending.
• Home rule authorizes the municipal governing body to set its own expenditure limit annually at whatever level the governing body desires.

Currently, 46 percent of cities and towns in Arizona use a permanent base adjustment, while 45 percent use home rule and 8 percent use the state limit. A total of 54 percent of Arizona municipalities do not use home rule.

The council and staff of the city of Sedona have historically chosen to place a vote for home rule on the ballot every four years to authorize them to spend as much as they would like, and except on one occasion, have managed to secure voter approval for the measure.

Under the state expenditure limit, the city of Sedona would be allowed to spend $15.4 million each year, in addition to certain exclusions such as debt service. The fiscal year 2027 budget set by council and staff is $103 million.

Why No On Home Rule?

Home rule doesn’t truly represent the public will. A result that is achieved through use of public funds to promote misinformation, which is how Sedona councilors and staff have historically gotten it approved, is not a genuine expression of the public will. A result that is achieved via threats and blackmail is neither morally or legally valid. Consent alone gives legitimacy.

Home rule promotes government waste. With an ample budget at their disposal, city staff feel free to indulge in guesstimates without conducting sufficient project analysis. Additional staff are hired regardless of whether their employment can be justified. The existence of large amounts of funding encourages ambitious planning not grounded in community needs. Projects are approved before budgets are prepared. Projects are never evaluated for cancellation or adjustment based on their progress. Performance metrics are not set for either city employees or outside contractors or consultants and city contracts have no hard deadlines or penalties attached to require performance on budget. The city manager can spend up to $100,000 and can authorize changes to a project valued up to 10 percent of a project’s total cost without any legislative approval, and in instances that they unilaterally deem to be an “emergency,” staff can spend any amount they want without any city council approval at all. City staff also never hold post-mortems on completed projects to find out what went wrong and how they can do it better.

Home rule gives Sedona a budget more than twice the norm for cities of its size in Arizona and the rural West. The argument here is basically just the budget numbers for comparable cities around Arizona, New Mexico, Utah, Colorado, Wyoming, Montana; these can be filled in later.

Home rule rejects Sedona’s traditions. From 1902 until 1988, the Sedona community functioned well without a formal government or any government spending because community members volunteered to do what was necessary to keep the place running. Suggesting that paying outsiders to perform community functions as jobs forgets what Sedona was about. Home rule also gives Sedona a budget far out of proportion to the needs and desires of the simple artists and craftsmen who created this place. By all accounts, quality of life in Sedona was far better back when there was no city of Sedona.

Home rule leads to higher taxes. In 2013, the city raised its bed tax to market Sedona via the regional Chamber of Commerce, a function that should have been left to private businesses themselves in a free market. In 2017, the city council approved another new half-cent sales tax that was earmarked to fund approximately $35 million in road construction projects over the following decade, and in 2021, the council made the supposedly temporary tax permanent. The idea of additional tax increases to fund future projects has also been brought up by city staff in recent months. Higher taxes lead to big government and government overreach. If the city isn’t allowed to spend all the money it collects, either taxes can be cut, or Sedonans can get an annual tax rebate paid for in part out of tourist tax dollars.

Home rule helps city bureaucrats destroy the arts in Sedona. Creating a city apparatus of inspectors and cops and permitting allowed NIMBYs with a grudge to kill venues and performances, and the city’s continued desire to kill tourism will kill visual arts too.

Home rule drives special events and businesses out of town. The city’s actions to increase taxes, regulations, and traffic have increased the cost of handyman, plumbers, and other trades. They charge for a trip now. Service providers won’t service Sedona. Suppliers of raw materials won’t deliver to Sedona. Employees don’t want to commute into Sedona.

Home rule leads to more short-term rentals. By creating obstacles to small-scale development and prioritizing the construction of market-rate, for-profit homes that can be turned into STRs through the way the city building and land codes are designed, the city has incentivized the development of short-term rentals rather than long-term housing. A tourist-oriented transit program also furthers such development. In addition, city funds spent on tourism marketing, directly and indirectly, mean that the city is advertising STRs.

Home rule leads to the transfer of public funds to private entities through nonprofit grants and high-value contracts. Private corporations have preferential relationships with city staff and experience negotiating the bureaucratic process and are given a greater voice than the residents. Contracts are routinely handed out without bidding, such as those to the Sedona Chamber of Commerce and the contract for the Uptown parking garage. Nonprofits receive both annual grants and service contracts, but are expected to tailor their missions and program criteria to the city’s demands in return. The garage itself was justified as a concession to businesses after the city had engaged in extensive anti-tourism rhetoric. The municipality is not in charge of making sure the businesses that they like get enough business.

Home rule funds police brutality and a force out of proportion to community needs. We now have community members standing up at council meetings testifying about the treatment they receive from Sedona cops. Recently, we saw six police cars needed to bust a single person for drugs at their own home. Are five cops needed to tackle one old homeless guy? Should an 82-year-old get four tickets for an improper lane change? Sedona’s police chief sat in front of council and said she needed more staff not to solve any problem in the community, but simply because her department’s staffing level hadn’t grown sufficiently in proportion to other departments in the city. And let’s not forget they went behind our backs to install surveillance and tracking cameras with all the money they had on their hands.

Home rule encourages city purchases of formerly private land. This goes back to the acquisition of Ranger Station Park and has continued with the purchases of the Jordan Road site now being given away to the fire district, the Sedona Cultural Park, the 2411 SR 89A site, the Sunset Drive parcel planned for Sunset Lofts, and others. City removal of land from the publicly-available pool drives up housing and construction costs. In addition, city staff and council have explicitly made it clear that they are buying up land in order to prevent private owners from using it as they choose and are thereby manipulating the Sedona land market.

Home rule rewards poor performance by staff with high salaries. A lean government wouldn’t be given 5 percent to 10 percent automatic raises every year, nor would it be paying 45 people more than $100,000 a year in a time of economic crisis and the average staff member almost twice what the average worker makes.

Home rule damages the environment and impedes sustainability efforts. With ample funds at their disposal, city staff feel free to asphalt over Sedona, cut down people’s trees, pour tens of thousands of cubic yards of concrete, blast apart the red rocks they pretend to love, indulge in projects that waste hundreds of thousands of gallons of water, and build a transit system that increases carbon emissions—even while pretending that they are passionately concerned with reducing emissions.

Home rule destroys a small-town ethos. Constant development funded by a large budget does not preserve small-town values or align with community needs. Many Sedonans moved here to live in a small town and do not appreciate this rural Western community slowly being manicured into a plastic version of Stepford Sedona where everything is both artificial and controlled by Big Brother.

Home rule allows city employees to become out of control. The larger the budgets, the more numerous the projects, and the greater staff’s discretion, the less control democratically elected representatives have over staff. Staff routinely refuse to provide council with information, manipulate the information they present to council, and steer discussions and presentations to guide council to the decisions that they want.

Home rule rejects the concept of minimalism as a philosophical virtue. In traditional cultures, simplicity and efficiency are highly valued for their own sake. Governments that are minimal are known to be less oppressive and therefore closer to the philosophical ideal of freedom.

Home rule is anti-democratic. The state expenditure limit was originally set by the voters of this state after they became wary of big government. Returning to that limit, again by a vote, is an acknowledgment of the wisdom of the democratic process, especially given that the voters can revisit the issue whenever they desire to do so. Simply handing over unlimited authority to decide on spending to a small, largely self-selected group of individuals, however, is the opposite of democracy; it is the abnegation of democratic responsibility and the meek acceptance of oligarchy.

What Comes Next?

If home rule fails at the July 2026 ballot, the city’s existing operations will continue to be funded through June 2027 (fiscal year 2028) via its previous 2022 home rule authorization. All existing capital projects, however, will be paused as city staff are required to reevaluate the city’s financial position.

There are three alternatives for city funding following a no vote on home rule:

The city could return to the state expenditure limit after its home rule funding runs out in June 2027, leaning down its operations to the minimum required under state law, abandoning programs it has taken over that were traditionally run by community members, and returning to a reliance on community organizations and nonprofits staffed by volunteers as historically was the case in Sedona prior to its incorporation in 1988.

Or, the city could adopt a permanent base adjustment to reset its expenditure limit to a higher figure than that currently authorized by the state formula, which would allow the retention of more city operations but would deprive council and staff of the ability to set the budget as high as they would like each year.

Pursuing the PBA approach would likely require that the city hold a one-time override election in May 2027 to authorize an increased budget for that year alone, as the PBA itself would have to be placed on the ballot in July 2027 to go into effect in July 2028.

A third potential alternative–echoing Roman-style democracy–would be for voters to authorize each year’s budget individually via the one-time override process in an annual election.

Any of the three alternatives would reduce the amount of public money being spent on unneeded construction projects and civil servants in Sedona, while also compelling much greater efficiency in government and depriving unelected officials of the ability to decide how much of the public’s money they would like to spend without any direct input from the public.