Sedona was founded in 1902, but not incorporated until 1988, and through all that time, it remained a small town. The population grew from a few dozen to almost eight thousand, but it stayed a small town.
It was a town of dirt roads where kids could still shoot at tin cans on fenceposts, where there were carnivals and rodeos and fireworks in the public parks that were maintained by community volunteers, where small businesses thrived on skimming the tourist trade and serving fellow locals without developing grandiose ambitions. It was a town where bands and theatre troupes performed in people’s backyards and a crowd of three thousand residents would pack into Poco Diablo to hear Henry Mancini or Jazz on the Rocks. It was a town where the residents built their own charming, quirky, minimalist homes out of the local materials that surrounded them, as humans had done for tens of thousands of years. It was a town whose farming heritage lingered on into the 1970s until the arrival of outsiders hungry for subdivisions. It was a town where there was no government and no police force, where community nonprofits, particularly the Chamber of Commerce, Rotary clubs, Sedona Arts Center, and library, filled that role and organized residents on a noncoercive, voluntary basis.
The coming of new arrivals who were accustomed to life in big cities and unfamiliar with either agriculture, arts, or tourism progressively changed the ways in which social and political life in Sedona was structured. In general, the replacement of rural folks with urbanites was accompanied by increasing disdain on the part of city officials for both the democratic process and Sedona’s workers. The newcomers had the attitude that only professionals, not locals or generalists, were capable of managing what they saw and portrayed as the “needs” of the community, and further that such professionals, because they had what they considered to be the “best” or “right” answers to problems, were entitled to impose their preferences on the rest of the community without approval or consultation.
The newcomers’ big-city attitude rapidly made itself felt in Sedona’s government, and particularly in the city’s swelling budgets, which have exploded in the past decade and accelerated the process of transference of governance to unelected administrators, as described by Daniel W. Williams in “The Role of Performance Management in the Public Administration Discipline”:
“In the budgetary role the city manager coordinates a budget proposal providing the expert guidance the council needs to fulfill its legislative role. Of course, in so doing he absorbs a tremendous amount of discretion. Try as we might to describe this as technical competence, we must acknowledge that administrators at the rank of city manager make policy recommendations in such quantity and scope that they are making de facto policy decisions…
“On close examination, a typical governmental agency may exhibit only a modest linkage with democratic processes. Most decisions are made by administrators based on technical rationale. Even many legislative decisions are made at the initiative of the agency or based on its advice after it has discarded many alternatives. A major theme of budgeting literature for the past half century or longer has been that agencies hold the upper hand because of their monopoly access to information, the point of which is that they exercise substantial control over this central policy process…
“The upshot would appear to be that the administrator violates democratic sovereignty whenever he exercises discretion, which would seem to be almost constantly.”
Under this style of administration, which was intended to benefit and privilege unelected officials over taxpaying voters, Sedona’s budgetary “needs” grew from zero prior to incorporation to $103 million in fiscal year 2026. Sedona city staffing has grown from zero to 202 employees as of 2026. Meanwhile, public confidence in the city has fallen steadily and lawsuits against the city and its employees have multiplied as public policy has diverged farther and farther from the genuine needs of the community.
Sedona’s experience has not been unique. It is part of the global trend of the replacement of local, self-reliant productive cultures by globalized, hierarchical, nonproductive government entities. Those who are curious can read parallel accounts in other parts of the world, such as Ronald Blythe’s Akenfield or Helena Norberg-Hodge’s Ancient Futures: Learning from Ladakh.
We who grew up in rural America are well aware of this trend and are equally well aware that it has not been beneficial to the average person. We understand that the so-called “march of progress” has in fact amounted to trading away liberty, health, and free time in exchange for technological gewgaws–a wampum deal, the same sort the Dutch played on the Manhattan locals four centuries ago. We reject this deal and this premise and acknowledge that small, democratic, locally-sustainable societies offer far greater advantages than any urban environment. And we want to make sure that Sedona remains such a society, regardless of the efforts of those who want to sell it out to urban culture in exchange for their own personal benefit.