After spending over six hours during its March 26 meeting discussing the Baney Corporation’s request for a zone change to construct the proposed Village at Saddlerock Crossing the Sedona City Council unanimously voted to defer a decision for up to six months.

Prior to the deferral, members of the council appeared to be leaning toward voting down the zone change on 6.3 acres at the intersection of Soldier Pass Road and State Route 89A from commercial and medium-high density multifamily to lodging, which would be required to allow the construction of a 110-room hotel and 40 units of multifamily housing. Councilwoman Jessica Williamson and Councilman Pete Furman expressed support for the zone change, while Councilwoman Kathy Kinsella, Mayor Scott Jablow and Vice Mayor Holli Ploog stated they would oppose it. Councilwoman Melissa Dunn and Councilman Brian Fultz were undecided.

“[The vote] expresses a belief by the council that we can get there [and] that we can find a common ground between what the neighborhood is looking for in terms of the compatible project, what the city is looking for, in terms of a sufficient public benefit, and ultimately create a project that the city can be proud of,” the corporation’s attorney Benjamin Tate said following the meeting.

The most significant change the developers made to the proposal since the Sedona Planning and Zoning Commission voted 4-2 to approve the zone change, rejecting city staff’s recommendation that it be denied, has been to redesignate all of the project’s proposed 40 units of multifamily housing as affordable housing, rather than just 28 of them.

“It’s 17 times the last hotels’ affordable housing contribution that was approved in 2018. That’s the Marriott Residence Inn,” Tate said, referring to the estimated $14 million cost of the project’s housing units and the $824,000 that Marriott developer Paul Welker paid for a zone change in November 2018. “It’s orders of magnitude greater in terms of the public benefit being offered and the most meaningful contribution to affordable housing that hotel developers has ever put forward. But, in the interest of being responsive to the city and to the council, we’re going to see, within the realm of not putting the viability of the project in jeopardy if we can, if we can push that further.”

Tate informed the council that the hotel will cease its rooftop activities by 10 p.m. and that there are no hot tubs on the rooftops, explaining that previous renderings that included them were an “artistic flourish.”

“We’re happy to stipulate that there can’t be live music up there,” Tate said. ”If it’s just one more thing to ensure that noise will not be an issue with the rooftop. Both the restaurant and the rooftop lounge will be semi-public; this is just a way for us to ensure that we don’t have any parking overflow issues. Both the rooftop lounge and restaurant will be reservation-only for the public.”

Williamson suggested that the developers look at creating additional housing at another location.

“There’s not a lot of undeveloped land left in Sedona, and so the possibility of finding additional land to develop or workforce housing would be an extraordinarily difficult process to accomplish in this short amount of time,” Tate said. “No. 2, now you’re talking about a separate [development review] process … it would get really tricky.”

Public Comment

Thirty-one members of the public spoke on the zone change, with 17 opposing the change and 12 supporting it. Neighbors complained about the potential for increased noise and traffic, decreased property values and a perceived lack of public outreach by the Baney Corporation to the members of the Saddlerock neighborhood about the proposal. Tate said the Baneys have done “a considerable amount of outreach” focused “more broadly in West Sedona,” which has included a virtual meeting in the summer of 2021 and a neighborhood meeting in December 2021.

“There wasn’t a lot of interest from the public at the neighborhood meetings that we did have,” Tate said. “We certainly heard the neighbors and the city council loud and clear of what their expectation is going forward. And we will be doing a lot of direct engagement with the Saddlerock community.” 

“To go door to door the weekend before, I just feel that that’s not really … a way to [do] public outreach,” Jablow said.

Several neighbors claimed that outreach subcontractors from Arizona Municipal Strategies, which was hired by the Baney Corporation to canvas the neighborhood ahead of the meeting, did not properly identify themselves.

“I don’t think the neighbors were lying,” Tate said. “There may have been some misunderstandings. But I can tell you categorically that at no point did the people who we had out speaking to people in the neighborhood hide who they were working for, or working with.” Jablow called the developer’s proposal to include 40 units of affordable housing “a wash.” 

Tate said the property will have 40 to 50 individual employees, based on the number of W-2s, and added that it is highly unlikely that everyone working at the property will require new housing, meaning that it would be a net benefit to Sedona in terms of number of units.

“The wash on [the] number of housing [units], that’s better than anything we have today,” Dunn said. “Even if it’s a wash, we don’t even have projects going in today that [are] a wash. So will that set a precedent? Will that make council think about whether or not some of our code should change? If you’re going to build a new store, you have to build housing to go with a store? … I don’t know. But I would be willing to give you a chance to reach out … housing is of community benefit in the long run.”

Changing the zoning requires “justifiable, quantifiable reasons for doing it [for community benefit],” Kinsella said during the meeting. The Sedona Red Rock News subsequently asked Kinsella to compare or contrast the justifiable and quantifiable reasons in this case versus her vote to change the zoning for the city’s proposed Safe Place to Park Program.

“In this particular application, workforce housing units could be a community benefit if the number of units were sufficient to provide a surplus of units over the amount of need for units that the project itself would create,” she said. “In my opinion in this specific case the 110 lodging units … are not offset by the 40 [housing] units proposed. I’m interested to see if the applicant changes their application to better offset their proposal. I feel that deferring a decision to provide time for the applicant to consider the impact-benefit ratio was in order.”

Tate said that Baney will be scheduling several future public outreach meetings.