The 9-0 unanimous vote Thursday, Jan. 17, against rezoning El Rojo Grande Ranch by the Yavapai County Planning and Zoning Commission was a tremendous victory for opponents of the housing project.
More than 300 residents exercised their First Amendment right to assemble and petition their local government for a redress of their grievances about the rezoning proposal.
We sincerely thank the commissioners — Jim Stewart, Bob Cothern, Jim Peterson, Dale Famas, Sandy Griffis, Curtis Lindner, Mike Ellegood, Mark Mumaw and Kevin Osterman — for listening to all the speakers and then voting with the community to deny the rezoning.
The meeting was a long slog, lasting more than seven hours — not an easy one to sit through. But democracy was never promised to be quick nor easy and those committed to change must patiently endure in order to persevere.
We thank all the members of the Strategic Task Force for El Rojo Grande who spoke at the meeting.
Additionally, we thank the many members of this group who reached out to us over the last few weeks via email, phone and letter to the editor and those who contacted us immediately after the vote and over the weekend to thank our newspaper for our two editorials that supported their position and strongly stood in opposition to the rezoning and for running their letters to the editor.
We ran nearly every letter we received and that chorus of opposition encouraged even more rezoning opponents to attend the meeting.
We still believe that the proposal will cause more harm than good, which an overwhelming majority of Sedona area residents appear to also believe.
We sincerely appreciate the many Strategic Task Force members who told us via email and phone call that our news stories about the rezoning and our editorials and letters to the editor helped encourage members of the public to reach out to their ad hoc organization and see how they could help with letters to the commissioners or by speaking at the meeting.
One member of the task force told us via email over the weekend that “your paper was instrumental in getting all the information out on the Cottonwood meeting.”
We are here to serve as a voice for the community we have served for more than half a century.
Another wrote via social media that our Jan. 16 editorial, “Yavapai County’s approval of El Rojo Grande rezoning will only benefit Illinois,” “has been shared properly and proudly.”
The opponents to rezoning used an innovative strategy of breaking up their extensive and well-researched argumentation into blocks and then assigning speakers — limited by the meeting procedure to speak for only two minutes each — to present their argument as a comprehensive whole. The chorus of united speakers was enough to sway to commission and we applaud this strategy.
Our quick Facebook post announcing the vote results after the meeting was viewed by more than 4,200 people and shared by 26 users, which is highly unusual for a story about a procedural meeting, but indicates the high level of public interest in how the vote would turn out.
But the battle is not over. The P&Z vote is not the end of the story. The commission’s vote is merely a recommendation to the Yavapai County Board of Supervisors, who are scheduled to take up the issue for a final decisive vote on Wednesday, Feb. 20.
While the supervisors place heavy stock in P&Z recommendations, the elected supervisors are under different pressures than the appointed commissioners and the P&Z victory might only be a temporary one. Three supervisors on the other side of Mingus Mountain — Craig L. Brown, Rowle P. Simmons and Jack R. Smith — are not beholden to Verde Valley voters like Supervisors Randy Garrison and Tom Thurman are, so opponents to rezoning must demonstrate why rezoning negatively affects Yavapai County and those supervisors’ constituents, even if they live nowhere near the parcel in question.
Rojo Grande rezoning opponents must now rededicate themselves to planning for another meeting before the supervisors and must do so with the same vigor and passion as they did last week. They must go into that meeting as if the P&Z meeting never happened.
We trust that both opponents and proponents of the project will continue to send us letters about their views and rely on our newspaper as they have thus far to inform them of further updates in this process.
Christopher Fox Graham
Managing Editor
