Consultant cites high frustration, staff turnover & poor communication

Sedona City Council unanimously approved the three-year strategic plan for the Sedona Police Department, developed by the Center for Public Safety Management, a Washington, D.C.-based consulting firm, on June 9.

“In my experience within [SPD] for the 21 years, I have not gone through it at any stage,” SPD Police Chief Stephanie Foley said when asked by council if a similar plan for the SPD has ever been written.

She started at SPD in 2005 as a dispatcher, became an officer, was promoted to sergeant in 2015, lieutenant in 2018, deputy chief in 2021 and chief of police on Aug. 22, 2022.

“Over the last two and a half, three years, we have faced our share of challenges, despite those obstacles and distractions,” she said. “Our team remained focused on serving the community and moving the department forward.”

The plan’s five goals are: Improve organizational transparency and communication, improve internal planning and organizational processes, enhance leadership and employee development, modernize technology and SPD infrastructure, and stabilize the SPD workforce.

The $37,500 plan was created after completing anonymized surveys and interviews with over 90% of staff, according to Cmdr. Heather Penner, along with an April 16 public listening session.

“The survey responses themselves were not provided to the city,” City Records Clerk David Jakim, wrote in response to a NEWS records request. “They are considered by the vendor to be their proprietary work product and are retained by them. The city was provided only the summary results that are in the Strategic Plan document.”

Communications

The bulk of the council’s discussion centered on the plan’s two most prominent findings: Poor internal and public communications and workforce instability.

“We work with agencies that are large and small. … There were some things that surprised me about Sedona,” CPSM consultant Jarrod Burguan said. “The amount of frustration [within SPD] that I sensed here was surprising. That is more than what I normally see in many communities.”

The lack of external communication “came up repeatedly as a theme in one-on-one interviews; it came up within many cases, even in the surveys,” Burguan said. “Even when we spoke with other city department heads and other city employees, it came up there, and it came up in the community. It came up in every facet of this evaluation.”

The plan calls in the first or second year for a dedicated public information officer or a consulting firm for external communications, new SPD branding and post-meeting summaries within the agency.

Retention

The plan repeatedly flagged turnover and retention as significant concerns, warning that “ongoing turnover may impact service delivery and organizational continuity.”

Employee attrition and leadership turnover were among the most commonly cited issues, and stabilizing the SPD workforce became the plan’s fifth major goal — with improved employee retention listed as one of its three desired outcomes.

“Turnover has been relatively high … that was a challenge and a threat that was cited from people both inside and outside of the organization,” Burguan said.

Foley said the city has been looking at turnover and retention rates over the last several years.

“Based on a preliminary review, SPD’s turnover rate appears to be well below the national average for local agencies of similar size, according to [the International City/County Management Association] … the annual average [national] turnover rate is approximately 18.2%,” Foley said. “Also, I’m working with Human Resources now to fully understand SPD’s turnover rate, as well as trends over time.”

Ploog asked what the turnout rate was.

“I don’t have those numbers yet, but like we said, when we’re preliminary looking at, we are under that rate,” Foley said.

In April, the NEWS requested that SPD provide attrition and turnover statistics for the last decade,

“This will be identified in the new strategic plan which is still in process,” Sedona City Manager Anette Spickard wrote.

The NEWS submitted a follow-up request for the data Wednesday, June 10, Spickard was out of the office until after the deadline, and Deputy City Manager Lauren Browne said the response requires Spickard’s approval.

Sergeant Training

Sgt. Jesus Perron, who resigned May 26 in a widely circulated email, wrote that SPD had drafted a formal sergeant training program by June 2025 but never implemented it for him — then served him a Performance Improvement Plan and extended his probation days before his one-year anniversary for deficiencies he wrote that the program was designed to prevent.

“The public has already seen the articles, the social media disputes, the years of senior-level internal fighting, and the attrition that followed,” Perron wrote. “It does not take a commissioned study to identify the source of dysfunction inside an organization when the pattern has already been visible for years. When senior leadership spends years consumed by internal conflict, self-preservation and crisis management instead of developing, mentoring, supporting, and retaining officers, the outcome becomes predictable. The organization loses stability, institutional knowledge, trust and future leaders.”

“The supervision corps of the agency was very, very young, those sergeants, those first line sergeants that are so critical to the health of an organization … for modeling the behavior that you want and setting the standard that you want,” Burguan said.

Burguan said he learned that there is not a specific field training officer program for sergeants when they’re newly promoted.

“Again, I cited the youth and the tenure of some of the supervisors in the organization,” he said. “There’s a little bit of inconsistency in the way all that new information is fed to those new supervisors. That is accomplished by developing a formal FTO program for sergeants.”

Among the technology priorities outlined in the plan, expanding SPD’s drone program is one its employees flagged themselves, according to Burguan, and creating a traffic enforcement plan.

Ploog asked Foley to come back before council within the next three months, and “maybe a quarterly at the beginning update to council would be in order.”