Following the Sedona City Council’s budget work sessions on April 30 and May 1, the city of Sedona may hire at least 12.76 new full-time equivalent employees in fiscal year 2025-26 to fill newly created positions, as well as hiring additional staff to fill vacant or unfilled positions and several consultants.

According to the FY26 proposed budget, this will increase the total number of city staff to 201.65 if fully staffed. positions except for the two court specialists. The estimated cost of the new positions is $2,937,712.

Staff had originally proposed adding 14.76 FTE new staff positions during the budget sessions, to include five patrol officers, three traffic officers, a community outreach officer, an emergency manager and a part-time records technician for the Sedona Police Department; two court specialists and a full-time security officer for the municipal court; a dedicated short-term rental code enforcement officer for the City Clerk’s Office; and the conversion of part-time traffic control assistant positions to full-time.

After review, council approved moving ahead with all of the new

Staffing History

Finance Director Barbara Whitehorn reviewed the history of staff levels with City Council at the beginning of the session, noting that in the aftermath of the Great Recession of 2008, the city reduced staffing levels from 167 in FY09 to 117 in FY12.

“We’ve increased, in 16 years, only 13.2%,” Whitehorn said. “It’s a pretty normal increase over time.”

Sedona’s estimated population declined from 10,017 in 2012 to 9,819 in 2023.

Councilman Brian Fultz asked staff if there were actually negative consequences from eliminating those positions.

“Essential things continued to move forward,” Deputy City Manager Andy Dickey said, adding that the jobs cut were primarily project managers and other roles related to optional capital improvement projects.

“Most people want to have a job where they’re closer to their home,” Human Resources Manager Russ Martin said with regard to hiring and staff compensation. “It is imperative that we have, if you will, the premium to come here, because they are taking time out of their day to come here in that commute.”

The average city of Sedona salary as of March 2025 is $74,219.

Police & Code Enforcement

SPD Support Services Manager Erin Loeffler and Police Chief Stephanie Foley presented council with several different staffing models to explain hiring additional police staff, with one of those models estimating a need for 13 additional officers, another recommending between 69 and 78 officers total and a third estimating a need for 54 officer-hours per day.

“It’s more needed to have 13,” Foley said. “I’m not asking for 13, I’m asking for nine.”

According to the numbers Foley presented, including the newly approved positions, SPD’s FTE count would rise from 40.5 in FY15 to 60.5 in FY26, while the number of sworn officers would increase 30% from 30 to 39.

Council agreed to add nine officers but to fund the positions for only nine months to allow time to fill them.

“Are collisions and injuries and fatalities increasing?” Councilman Pete Furman asked.

“They’re not decreasing to that we already have,” Foley said. “In my opinion, we haven’t reached the level of being out there in enforcement that we need to see a decrease.”

Per the city’s previous budgets, financial reports and SPD data, crime in Sedona declined 32.8% from a peak of 662 arrests in FY07 to 445 in FY24; traffic collisions fell from a peak of 255 in FY13 to 233 in 2023 and 234 in 2024; and traffic citations fell 52.9% from a peak of 4,589 in FY08 to 2,161 in calendar 2024.

“Is it really realistic you’re going to hire all these people when you have vacant positions?” Vice Mayor Holli Ploog asked.

“I do think it’s realistic. We have a waiting list now,” Foley said. “We have not grown to the same level the rest of the city [staff] has.”

Foley also proposed hiring a commercial vehicle inspector who could “put vehicles out of order and not allow them on the road.”

City Clerk JoAnne Cook said that staff’s intention was to hire “a qualified code enforcement officer with experience” without having to train for the STR-specific position. Community Development Director Steve Mertes noted that while the new staffer would work with his department, that person would formally be under the supervision of the City Clerk’s Office.

“I think that this is a position that the public has been clamoring for,” Councilwoman Kathy Kinsella said.

City STR complaint data earlier this year indicated that 8% of residents filed STR complaints.

In Process

As of May 9, the city’s website listed available full-time openings for a maintenance worker, community services officer, court specialist and police officers.

City Manager Anette Spickard said that she was “in the beginning stages of recruitment” to fill the vacant second deputy city manager post, authorized in last year’s budget.

Mertes said that the city will continue to try to fill the vacant senior planner’s position again.

“One of my objectives in fiscal year ’26 is to onboard that coordinator,” Communications Manager Lauren Browne said with regard to hiring an additional tourism coordinator authorized in the FY25 budget. “We’re doing interviews next week.”

“We’re currently working on updating [Kegn Moorcroft’s] job description … to make sure that her job description include being a main point of contact for emails and phone calls that are coming in to all of our inboxes and she can help guide them through the engagement process,” Browne added, a role that Spickard described as “an ombudsman position.”

Cook requested $15,000 to hire a consultant to do a “holistic review” of the city’s more than 1,200 contracts and determine their value to the city, while Housing Manager Jeanne Blum requested $105,000 for a housing strategy consultant “so that we can build out the housing plan that we feel that we need in order to make a comprehensive sort of plan for housing development.”

“We’re looking at getting a temp to help us convert all our as-built [plans] into electronic [format] as well,” Public Works Director Kurt Harris said. Spickard described the position as an internship not adding an FTE that was “too small for the council to debate.”

Harris also requested a $35,000 ongoing allocation for a licensed arborist to help diagnose dead trees to be removed. “We get a lot of pushback from people,” Harris said. “We just want to have that level of data and authority to make that decision.”

“We are in the process of selecting a contractor for [an] Uptown circulator study,” Transit Administrator Amber Wagner said, with the contract to be awarded in early summer.

Less formally, the city is also paying for tourism professionals at Sedona hotels.

“We’re on track to hit about 40 [familiarization trips] just for context,” Tourism Manager Andrew Grossman said. “To date we’ve hosted 130 people within those 40 FAMs.”