Twelve replacement “Stay and Play” banners went up along State Route 179 on Jan. 29 as the latest beautification effort by the Red Rock Road Enhancement Maintenance District, which has maintained the corridor ’s landscaping, lighting and pedestrian infrastructure since May 2008.
The Yavapai County special taxing district is also poised to take ownership of community-selected art installations designed for VOC roundabouts in the coming months.
“We are managing the landscaping and hardscaping so the lights, benches, receptacles and plants along 179,” RREMD Board Member Melina Fuhrmann said. “We’re an elected special district board within Yavapai County. Since we’re in the unincorporated part of Yavapai County, instead of having things managed out of Prescott or Cottonwood, they created the special districts. There are five board members, and we have regular quarterly meetings. What we decided to do right now is replace these very faded signs because some of them have also been lost or possibly stolen.”
The 12 banners are “just short of $2,000,” and are identical to the original 20 banners that were installed in 2009 and designed by Sedona-based-firm MargoBdesign, and the remaining eight will likely be put up next fiscal year, Fuhrmann said.
“Some of the banners have just worn away with the sun,” Fuhrmann said. “And we’re going to try to make sure that this time we have a different type of lock on the bracket, so it’s not possible” for them to be stolen.
RRREMD has been working on the 179 corridor’s landscaping. In 2024 and 2025, the district planted 100 plants each year, budgeting approximately $5,000 annually for planting
“We probably have a few hundred more [plants] to go,” Fuhrmann said. “Every year we’re budgeting, and if you drive along there, you can see the little stakes and the planting that’s going on.”
The district has faced challenges with wildlife, particularly javelina eating certain plants such as red yucca, that they have been replacing with less appetizing species.
“The board has been against using Roundup,” Fuhrmann said. “We’re really removing the weeds by hand or using weed whacking, and not polluting the environment with respect to the water, the animals and the insects.”
In order to prevent theft, the district is adding locks for the banner brackets. The banners are mounted high on poles, but could potentially be reached by climbing or from the back of a truck.
Art in the Roundabouts
The district is in the final stages of taking over two community-selected sculptures in VOC roundabouts: “Village Treasures,” a scene of hummingbirds by Reagan Word for the Verde Valley School roundabout; and “Dream Catcher,” which features a dream catcher with a raven by Chris Navarro going in the Cortez Drive roundabout.
“Sedona Village Main Street Partnership is the interim ‘project manager/ owner/organizer’ of the art in the roundabout,” Fuhrmann said, of the project that went through nonprofit Big Park Regional Coordinating Council. “At the time of installation, the ownership will transfer to RRREMD.”
Board Chairman Dave Norton said he currently does not have an estimate on when the works will be installed, due to state permitting requirements, but he is optimistic that it will occur before the summer.
“We’re still navigating the Arizona Department of Transportation process of getting proper insurance documents so they can issue an encroachment permit,” he said.
Future art is slated for the Ridge Trail and Bell Rock Boulevard roundabouts pending funding.
“We’ll do the same process for the second two roundabouts,” Norton said “What we did for these two is we opened up a public process for artists to submit concepts, and then we held a couple of public open houses, showed the proposals and then the community voted on the sculptures that they wanted to see on the roundabouts, and that’s how we ended up with the two. They’re both local artists that live right here in the VOC. We’ll probably use that same process for these next two. We’re trying to get art that correlates with the area, so something that reflects where we are and what the community is.”
The district operates under an intergovernmental agreement with ADOT and is funded through a small taxpayer contribution from properties within the special district boundaries. For 2025, the RRREMD portion of the property tax rate was 0.0732%. The district is responsible for maintaining sidewalks, landscaping, lighting fixtures, pedestrian benches and trash containers along the corridor.
The limits of the RRREMD project are 1.63 miles along state 179 between milepost 305.45 and 307.0 and from the Coconino National Forest boundary in the south approximately 890 feet south of Rojo Drive to the Coconino National Forest boundary in the north approximately 465 feet north of East Bell Rock Boulevard.
