As the city of Sedona moves forward with policies to help grow residential areas, the City Council approved amendments to the Western Gateway and Soldier Pass Community Focus Areas.
At last month’s Planning & Zoning Commission meeting, commissioners and city staff discussed removing the CFA’s “lodging” references to replace them with “mixed-use development” references. This amendment would discourage building large lodging facilities in these areas within the city’s Community Plan.
“A zone change is consistent with the Community’s Plan documents. But there’s a caveat in there also that it doesn’t have to be 100% exactly consistent. Often we have competing interests in different parts of our plans, so there’s flexibility in that,” Community Development Director Jess McNeely said. “These are not regulations. Our Land Development Code is a zoning ordinance, it’s a regulation. [Community] Plans are just our guides.”
With CFAs guiding the P&Z and City Council approval process, the amendments would favor residential buildings, rather than continuing to draw in large corporate developers who focus on short-term rentals or resort-style buildings.
While the proposed mixed-use development amendment is different than a mixed-use zoning district, the mixed-use development covers a variety of housing, community areas and some lodging.
“What’s being proposed today is to de-emphasize the ‘lodging’ component of the plan in favor of housing. But the plan exists,” Councilwoman Holli Ploog said. “Many of the areas, I don’t know if all of them, are zoned differently than what the CFA anticipates. So they have to go through the zoning process still, once somebody was interested in developing any of those areas, whether they’re current property owners or future property owners.”
Yet the issue remains that two separate projects within both CFAs, respectively, have been ongoing for years.
On the south side of the State Route 89A and Soldier Pass Road intersection, the Baney Corporation has been planning, for the last six years, to build a 122-room resort with 40 multi-family units, 28 of which are workforce housing.
Within the Western Gateway area, the discussion was raised about the defunct Sedona Cultural Park as South Dakota-based property owner Mike Tennyson has been looking into selling the large lot to Truecraft Residential to build 674 residential units, along with commercial spaces.
Now with potential changes to the CFAs, representatives for both Tennyson and the Baney Corporation have expressed their concerns about these changes for their clients’ potential projects.
Although both projects propose some residential aspects — or in Trucraft’s case, a majority of residential spaces — they are now nervous that their projects will not be approved in light of the CFA amendments.
“The [city] vetted every issue that could possibly be thought of, and then it was put into the CFA,” said Michael Mongini, a representative for Mike Tennyson and the Cultural Park. “The CFA was thought out by people like Tennyson, who had lots of potential buyers. But unless their plan met what he thought was the intent of the CFA, he would not consider their contracts. He’d send them down the road.
“Then a company called Truecraft came along and they submitted a plan. What they’re proposing is consistent with your CFA. It was a tremendous amount of housing. It was going to be put in there of different varieties. And it had the component of lodging.”
The council approved the amendments unanimously. Previously, there had been one other public comment period at the P&Z meeting. Roughly 400 residents in and around each CFA were notified of the potential changes previous to both discussions.
“There are now an additional 1,500 lodging units that did not exist in 2016 in the Sedona area,” McNeely said, referencing short-term vacation rental units. “As a result, the community and council requested actions in all CFAs and all community plans that address these changing circumstances. The action that is requested is to have our plans reflect a desire to not increase lodging.”
