The Sedona City Council and city staff touched briefly on the city’s plans to spend $4,745,880 on its transit system in addition to addressing planned road-related capital improvements through fiscal year 2023-24 during their budget work session on June 14 and 15.
Transit capital project spending will include $800,000 to begin design work on the city’s planned transit maintenance facility and $856,370 to acquire buses for the city’s proposed microtransit service. According to the staff budget, “smaller-sized vans [light duty passenger vans] are estimated to cost $220,000 each.”
City transit administrator Robert Weber projected that the microtransit service could debut in September or October, although the manufacturers “have still not committed to a build schedule” for the buses.
“It may not make sense for certain parts of the town to have microtransit,” Weber said, following up his comments at the January council retreat that the system would be good for data collection and system optimization. He described the process as “building the plane while we’re flying it.”
The budget allocates a further $75,000 in 2024 capital project spending for the demolition or renovation of the former Chevron station at 125 W. State Route 89A — on the southwest corner of the Y — which the city acquired from the Arizona Department of Transportation in FY 2021-22.
The city will spend an additional $1.5 million on adding to the existing network of shared use paths in an effort to make Sedona more walkable and bikeable. These will include work on connections from Navoti Drive to Dry Creek Road, from Thunder Mountain Road to SR 89A and from Shelby Drive to SR 89A, as well as paths along Dry Creek Road and Brewer Road.
Deputy City Manager Andy Dickey proposed that “it would be great at some point to have a team of volunteers that are actively going on these trails” to report when paths need sweeping or weeds need to be pulled.
Dickey also discussed recent chip, slurry and fog sealing on Sedona roads. “The fog seal doesn’t really do a lot,” Dickey said. “We call it, in our industry, eye candy for our residents … it makes the road look black.”
The draft budget called for spending $1,024,560 on continued design studies for the Uptown parking garage, a project that was placed on hold last year due to cost and public opposition. It also allocated $12,923,600 in FY 24 spending to the Forest Road extension project. Construction of the extension is 25% complete, with completion now estimated for May 2024 at a total cost of $20.4 million. As of March, the city was projecting completion in November 2023 at a cost of $9.1 million.
No funding was included in the budget for the Uptown one-way streets program, which is currently scheduled to be funded in FY 26. The proposal would convert Smith Road, Wilson Road and more of Van Deren Road to one-way streets to increase parking supply.
City traffic data included in the budget showed that there were nine holiday weekends with delays greater than 10 minutes down Cooks Hill along SR 89A and delays greater than 30 minutes on SR 179 during FY 2022. That same year, there were 24 days with delays greater than 15 minutes when coming down North SR 89A into Uptown, 30 days with delays greater than 30 minutes when coming up SR 179 and 85 days with delays greater than 10 minutes when coming down Cooks Hill into Uptown. The city is currently estimating 80 days of delays during FY 24 for each of the latter two routes.
Councilman Brian Fultz referred to the 80-day projection of delays greater than 30 minutes along SR 179 as “sobering, especially since I live there.”
Director of Public Works Kurt Harris discussed the city’s conceptual plan to close Back o’ Beyond road to non-resident access with an electronic gate and the provision of a separate shared use path for pedestrians and cyclists.
Fultz asked Harris if he was familiar with a proposal for “alternate parking and trail access for Cathedral [Rock Trail], which to me just seems brilliant on multiple fronts. And taking out the need for accessing Cathedral from Back o’ Beyond altogether, so it’d make a project like this unnecessary, I would like to think, if we were actually able to eliminate that trailhead there. What’s our appetite to push hard on the Forest Service to play ball?”
“It’s a nonstarter with them,” Dickey said. “They don’t want a visual impact on the scenic byway in that area. However, we haven’t given up.”
Dickey added that there was a concept to locate a new parking area within U.S. Forest Service land in the interim while pursuing the construction of the new shared use path.
