Garage gets city sued for $1.4 million

Clarkdale’s Concert in the Park last Saturday featured Outside the Line playing classic rock and soul, possibly the strongest band of the season so far. Though billed as a variety band, they brought more of a sense of South Beach to the south side of the Verde Valley, even if their vigorous playing at times vanished their vocals. They set a high-energy club feel from the start with “Party On,” with lead singer DeAndra Johnson leading the dancing enthusiastically before it merged smoothly and naturally into “It’s All Right” and “We Are Family.” She delivered soaring fermatas on “Don’t Stop Believin’,” and for “Uptown Funk,” one of the most popular numbers of the evening, she was challenging the audience on the dance floor to “show me what you got in the back!” They did. “China Grove” was a sensation for the audience; this was a song I never got into as a youth, but this group clearly had.

There was something about the band’s breathless “Don’t Stop Till You Get Enough” that sucked the dancers onto the floor, while the kids were cartwheeling to “Small-Town Girl.” These concerts are really ensemble events with all the community dance that’s involved. Amusingly, most of the crowd temporarily burned themselves out on “Ladies’ Night” before the band fired up “Burn, Baby, Burn!”—and then they missed the “Love Train” as well! “Oh What a Night” brought the oldsters back to their feet, delivered lively and light as it should be. “Let’s Go Crazy” and the “Cupid Shuffle” filled out the lineup of the night’s most popular tunes.

The band will be bringing their Elton John and Tina Turner tribute to SPAC on October 3. Also, for those on the right side of forty, the eye candy is way better in Clarkdale.

The Wild Flagstaff Music Festival plays all day tomorrow at Charly’s Pub, while saxophonist Chris Counelis will make an appearance at the Mary D. Fisher Theatre on Monday, and the next Concert in the Park will be August 15. In visual arts, the Artists’ Coalition of Flagstaff will be holding their open studio event on August 22 and 23. A series of fashion events are also scheduled over the next two months leading up to the annual Fashion Lab Sedona in October.

This year’s Bayreuth Festival, which was supposed to be a special blowout for the hundred and fiftieth anniversary, has blown up in the Wagner family’s faces, quite predictably due to the attempted incorporation of “AI” nonsense into the staging of the Ring Cycle. No set the same twice, we’re told. Reports indicate that audience hostility to the production has challenged even the prodigious booing talents of the Bayreuth claque, with a successful performance by Christian Thielemann on the podium proving insufficient to rescue the production. As a concession, the singers have apparently begun making a few slight concessions to realism, such as a gesture when Siegfried gets stabbed. One begins to long for a Mime who actually whales the living daylights out of an anvil and a good old-fashioned live horse. Some chain mail that tinkles, not much drapery on the Rheinmadchen, an actual rainbow bridge...

And do you know where we could have all those things, incidentally? Why, at the Sedona Cultural Park—which was designed for it. For those who don’t recall the story, Georgia Frontiere was turned on to the park by a friend of hers who was a huge Wagner fan. That amphitheater was built with the goal of one day doing a full production of the Ring Cycle. The concrete ramp at the back of the stage? That’s for Brunhilde to charge up on horseback during the immolation scene. Imagine what Wagner would look like in that setting, torches flaring, smoke billowing everywhere, the masses of the red rocks looming starkly in the moonlight. Fortunately, thanks to Bill Noonan and the rest of the Save Sedona team, we now have a chance to see that here one day. No thanks to the so-called “leadership” of a city animated by the arts.

As if there weren’t already enough breaches of contract and lawsuits involving the Uptown garage and Forest Road debacle, here’s another one: On July 17, Fann Contracting filed suit against the city of Sedona in Coconino County Superior court for breach of contract and unjust enrichment in the amount of $1.4 million. Fann’s initial contract for $10,683,253 was later increased by $893,252.96 due to city staff’s delays and by a further sum when staff asked Fann to undertake additional work, but according to the lawsuit, staff had no intention of keeping to their end of the bargain.

The Fann suit notes that the contract awarded to Fann for constructing Forest Road was awarded as part of a competitively-bid public process, while the garage contract which McCarthy Construction received was awarded without any public process or bid.

“Fann Contracting timely mobilized and commenced work on the road project as directed by the city,” the suit states. “Following commencement of construction, Fann Contracting was forced to stop work and demobilize based on its discovery of multiple design errors and conflicts, many of which involved existing utilities.”

Fann Contracting was prevented from prosecuting work on the road project from June 2022 through October 2023 as the city and its civil designer and engineer of record, Kimley-Horn and Associates Inc., worked to resolve the design errors and utility contracts…

During construction, the city requested that Fann Contracting perform additional work not specified in the contract. Among other items of additional work, the city requested that Fann Contracting perform the excavation, rock blasting, shoring walls (soil nail/shotcrete), structural fill in the floor, and finish grading in support of the separate garage project on the premise that these items were to be removed from McCarthy’s scope. Fann Contracting agreed to perform the additional site work for the garage project under change order no. 9, increasing the contract price of the roadway project by the sum of $3,777,950.

However, Fann Contracting executed change order no. 9 in the form proposed by the city in reliance on the city’s representations and assurances that the city would treat the additional time necessary to complete the work by way of a time extension on the subsequent change order no. 10, as memorialized by email correspondence from Fann Contracting to the city dated August 1, 2024.

Following execution of change order no. 9, the city delayed Fann Contracting’s performance of the added parking garage excavation work. Among other delays, the city and its architect of record, Gabor Lorant Architects Inc., diid not deliver final approved design plans for the additional work until November 13, 2024—more than three months after the execution of change order no. 9. In addition to the delayed design, the city and GLA failed to provide timely reviews and approval of the submitted soil nail wall engineering…

In addition, the city adversely impacted and delayed Fann Contracting’s completion of the added parking garage excavation work by directing McCarthy to mobilize on or before January 2025 and to commence work within the added parking garage excavation work in March 2025, knowing that Fann Contracting was still working within the small confines of the garage project site…The city wrongfully denied Fann Contracting’s substantiated requests for time extensions. Additionally, the city refused to process and pay justified change order requests submitted by Fann Contracting for the adverse financial impacts it suffered as the result of city-caused delay and onsite interference…

The city wrongfully withheld processing of and payment on Fann Contracting’s change order requests for additional cost and contract time attributed to the city’s directives, scoping decisions, design changes, and project delays. The city wrongfully denied Fann Contracting’s final pay applications and withheld both the earned contract funds and the earned contract retention, without legal or equitable basis.

Fann submitted its notice of claim to the city on March 2, with no response as usual, and is now seeking at least $1,402,512.10 in damages for the city’s breach of contract, violations of the Little Miller Act, and unjust enrichment, plus interest at 12 percent annually from October 19, 2025, the date of submission of Fann’s final bill.

Not only are these projects an enormous waste of money and totally unneeded, the utterly inept city staff can’t even organize them in a sufficiently orderly fashion to avoid getting sued by their own contractors. I hope everyone who voted yes on home rule approves of this sort of waste, fraud, and abuse.

The Planning and Zoning Commission approved a two-year time extension for the Baney Corporation’s Village at Saddlerock Crossing hotel and apartment project on Tuesday evening after city staff’s intentional obstruction of the project delayed the issuance of building permits for the project beyond the original two-year deadline. The hundred-page packet for the time extension application offers a vivid lesson in the methodology that city staff use to obstruct projects. It includes timelines showing how planning mismanager Comrade Meyer systematically bullied the applicants with demands for changes throughout the entirety of 2025 before they could even apply for permits in October 2025. It includes the highly pertinent information, addressed to Meyer, that “the submittal package for permit review consists of 633 plan sheets. The permit submittal is so voluminous that you requested the development team break the submittal into three separate packages submitted a month apart to allow for adequate review time.” It includes Meyer refusing to answer inquiries from the applicant on the basis that she couldn’t make a determination without “a full permit set.” It even includes Meyer demanding that the city be given final approval of whatever artwork the hotel installs to fulfill the public art requirement in the condition of approval.

Attorney for the applicant Alex Hayes described the application as “a pretty simple request” and explained that given the extent of city staff’s demands for changes to the project, “one year is exceptionally tight to achieve that…two years is even a challenge.” “I don’t think they’re going to need two years, but that’s what they’re requesting today,” Hayes added. He emphasized that a two-year rather than a one-year extension would save the applicants coming back “and wasting everybody’s time” if future delays were to occur.

Hayes elaborated on the two criteria required by code to be met when a project deadline is extended: “circumstances beyond the control of the applicant,” which in this case consisted of the delays incurred as a result of the “extensive coordination” with city staff required to meet staff’s demands for revisions, and unrecoverable expenditure of a substantial amount of money, which, for the Saddlerock project, is currently $1,531,246 worth of design fees. Although a project need meet only one of the two requirements to apply for an extension, “in this case, the applicant satisfies both criteria,” Hayes stated. He repeated that the delays and costs were related to no changes in the original Saddlerock proposal, merely to the “significant design and engineering effort” needed to meet city staff’s demands and conditions. Additionally, he was required to pay a formal tribute of gratitude to city staff during the presentation, explaining how thankful they were to have been delayed by staff’s obstructions and what a pleasure it had been to work with staff. In a tutelary cult, such as a civil religion, the priest’s palm always has to be greased with flattery if nothing else.

New commissioner Daniel Wiencek pulled the tail of the elephant in the room when he asked if city staff’s response time had caused the project to be delayed. Given the evidence in the packet that staff’s interference had caused the delays, Comrade Meyer couldn’t well deny it, so she tried to spin it, first dismissing the schedule overrun as being merely “a little bit longer than normal” and then deflecting the commission’s attention by talking about her recent staff changes before trying to blame the delays on “probably a combination of both.” She then added that she expected there would be a third submission of plans for a project of this size, with the architects currently working on revising a second submission.

“Things like this do happen during the permit review process,” chairwoman Sarah Wiehl condoled. They wouldn’t if we had by-right development like we did fifty years ago, no permits or inspections required.

Hayden Baney gave a very poor display when asked to discuss the project’s community benefits, having to be prompted by his colleagues to come up with elements such as helping SFD close one of their pipeline loops, making an endowment to the Sedona Historical Society, and building a connector road to Saddlerock Circle. “And of course the forty-six units of workforce housing,” Hayes jumped in.

Commission comments saw Wiehl gushing about how the service industry complex is “a model for emerging best practices in the area” and shows a “high commitment to sustainability,” which was ludicrous, as nothing about the design involves either good practices or sustainability. That site should have remained an agricultural use. That would have been a real commitment to sustainability and good practices. Jo Martin attempted to make a “safety” issue out of the fact that the Baneys can tell the Oak Creek Water Company, which is currently using the site as a laydown yard for its mains replacement project and plans to do so for another ten months, to vacate the property prior to completion of the project if the Baneys are ready to begin construction on the hotel.

Following the commission’s unanimous support, the extension will go to that gang calling themselves the city council on September 8 for final approval.

Two seats on the planning commission will be available this fall, with city staff planning to issue the official announcement and request for applications next week. Two-term commissioner Kali Gajewski, who is one of those whose terms are expiring, stated that she will not be reapplying for the seat due to her disillusionment with staff’s pretenses at code reform, which she called out in fairly strong terms for someone who has been part of the city machine for an extended period. Gajewski said that after six years of watching the commission be promised code updates by staff, she had become resigned to the fact that it “will not happen” and she would not be able to influence those changes as a public official. “It was the reason I signed on for a second term,” Gajewski said. “Over six years, to be told, ‘Just wait, it’s coming,’ is pretty frustrating...to watch it continue to push is frustrating.”

What Gajewski just provided, although she didn’t seem fully aware of the fact, was yet more evidence that staff have no intention of introducing any rule changes that will make it easier to build in Sedona. The system’s complexity and obstruction isn’t a bug; it’s a design feature.

During the commission’s Tuesday discussion of the fake staff proposal for LDC updates, this theme continued to come across, with commissioners, knowingly or unknowingly, acting as if they were blithely unaware of staff’s lack of seriousness and making sensible proposals for code reform that will never actually be implemented. Wiehl openly called for a “code of common sense.” “People and businesses should be able to build as they wish,” Wiehl said, which is absolutely correct; the problem is that’s she’s not previously shown consistency with that philosophy.

Gajewski called attention to the urgent need to get rid of the city’s parking codes—even as council and staff are pushing more parking regulation in Uptown. “That’s just not the highest and best use of our land in Sedona,” Gajewski said, before again criticizing the wasteful requirement to build garages and the prohibition on garage conversions: “I could park so many cars at my house, but I am not allowed to convert my garage.” However, she then gave away that she associated parking reform with the larger Leninist agenda of staff, which she apparently shares: “If you want people to use your transit, you make them uncomfortable.” No. We’re not getting on your goddamn buses just because you want us to.

“Cities more and more want to control the design of projects...I urge us to think about why we need to control the design process,” Rob Smith commented. “I’m gonna be a proponent of less control by the city...when I started my career in the 70s and 80s, there were no controls.” He added that Sedona could have a successful, functional code “without any design standards.”

The trouble with Smith’s seemingly sensible proposals is that we know now he’s not the least bit sincere about them. During the home rule debate over the last two months, Smith established himself as one of the loudest and most obnoxious advocates for retaining city overspending and overstaffing with a yes vote on home rule—and, as Gajewski’s remarks and the Saddlerock situation reminded us during this same meeting, it’s city staff who are the biggest obstruction to code reform. It is a logical inconsistency to support proposals such as code reform or the Cultural Park while simultaneously supporting home rule. Home rule means continued control of the city by staff, who will block any effort to take away their power or do anything good for the community. Until we strip the city’s budget and staffing levels down to a fraction of where they are now, staff will continue to push their own agenda at the expense of the rest of us and no useful reform of any city regulations will be possible. By their fruits shall we know them.

Staff’s agenda of destroying Sedona for its residents and bringing in more outside developers while segregating and increasing inequality within the community was on full display as community undevelopment director Comrade Allender unfolded additional details of his proposals for the so-called “code critique.” Forget staff actually taking the comments received through that process seriously; the process is only intended, as Allender explained, to let the public blow off steam so staff “can focus on moving the process forward.” Nevertheless, the process will supposedly now be proceeding now that he finally bought the software package he’s been waiting on. “That has been the cause of a little bit of a delay,” Allender soft-pedaled. From April to September is a “little” delay? You could have built a dozen houses in that time. The critique, we are told, will run for two months, and will consist of an online forum and, generously, “at least one open house forum.”

Allender then proceeded to defend the purposeful obstructions in Sedona’s codes from a particular—and non-Sedona—perspective: that of investors looking to buy luxury properties in Sedona. Apparently wealthy outsiders who don’t have to live in their cars in the forest love Sedona’s complex and nearly unmeetable design standards because it drives up the prices they can charge and the commissions they can collect. Allender next linked his understanding of a need for code reform to a need to attract more luxury real estate investors to Sedona by invoking the example of ceiling heights. When Sedona’s codes were written, he explained, eight-foot ceilings were the standard, but the market expectation today is for nine-foot or ten-foot ceilings, which means Sedona’s 22-foot overall height limit “no longer applies...they really don’t have a choice if they want to create a marketable product.”

And there’s the giveaway. Code and housing reform in Sedona is not about creating a marketable product for those who don’t live here and who, by virtue of the size of their pocketbooks, are known moral bankrupts and undesirable citizens. Code and housing reform is supposed to be about housing for residents, about minimalism and sustainability and getting away from the luxuriousness and waste of a “housing product” designed for big-city vacationers who want to pretend they’re having a cabin moment with their adjustable LED lighting and mini-splits. Code reform isn’t about facilitating what’s good for outsiders or investors; if anything, it will include tweaking the code so that, without any form of discrimination, outsiders and investors rather than blue-collar existing residents will find it much more difficult to build homes in Sedona. Allender clearly does not understand that concept, as his remarks on Tuesday night and as the contents of his farcical “balanced housing strategy,” with its fixation on state capitalism, government takeovers of private land, and the dilution of home ownership with apartment construction, have both betrayed.

I was willing to think that a Texan might be a better fit for this town, might have the capacity to grasp what life in a rural environment and rural values required. Now we know that’s not the case and he’s just another bureaucrat intent on imposing a big development agenda on the rural West.

“The code should be easy to follow and understand,” Allender claimed insincerely, adding that regulations should be tied to community objectives. “Is it clearly written and measurable? Can the applicant understand how to apply?...Do the benefits of that requirement justify the burden of meeting that regulation?” All excellent questions, except that the code that emerges from this critique process will display none of these qualities and meet none of these objectives. When Allender claimed the new code would be “even more visionary…more aggressive,” we can assume that what he means by aggressive is that it will aggressively attempt to attract more out-of-town developers. And since when was the existing code visionary? The code as it’s now written is a convoluted mess of bureaucracy inspired by whining NIMBYs with zero vision or focus.

“We certainly hear a lot of people tell us what they think,” Allender commented. Yes, but you don’t alter your behavior as a result of what you hear. The listening is purely performative on your part.

In this week’s surveillance state updates, it turns out, unsurprisingly, that Flock (un)Safety has its very own internal public relations guide to explain to its staff how to sell municipal governments on the virtues of their spycams. Remember when they sent one of their senior officers to Sedona in a failed effort to stop us from becoming the first city in Arizona to kick them out? Up in Iowa, police and sheriffs’ departments are now conducting a PR campaign of their own by explicitly training officers to lie to motorists about whether their traffic stops were the result of a Flock camera identification.

Latest developments suggest that locals working to get spycams out of their neighborhoods also have a new tool to use: safety regulations governing the placement of cameras adjacent to roads. While the idea of presenting Flock camera poles as a danger to drivers is absurd on the face of it, the argument will undoubtedly gain some useful traction; more importantly, it offers the chance to catch Flock in violation of existing regulations. In Ohio, for instance, the law requires that spycams be placed at least eight feet away from the edge of a travel lane. If Flock’s Ohio installers put any of the cameras at a shorter distance from the edge of a lane than that, there exists an immediate legal reason to remove those cameras regardless of the debate over whether they successfully enhance state violence. Start measuring.

And then there’s always federal regulations. As you may recall back when city staff were studying the possibility of installing their Uptown propaganda loudspeakers on freestanding poles, Tim Carter of Coconino County reminded council that the entire NEPA environmental review process, for instance, was applicable “if you want to hang a federally-funded photo on that wall, and put a nail in that wall.” Who knows how many Flock cameras have been installed in locations where they are not permitted by an obscure federal regulation, or without proper federal permissions, or simply in violation of Federal Highway Administration safety standards, as it’s turning out.

In Tennessee, congressional candidate Adam Lee Heimerman has been charged with taking the old-fashioned approach and simply shooting the Flock cameras down—and conveniently, the Supreme Court just ruled that the federal government can no longer regulate suppressors and short-barreled rifles under the National Firearms Act after Congress eliminated the taxes on those items and thereby the rationale for the regulations. Closer to home, Pinal County is getting rid of its Flock cameras entirely, with local officials citing respect for the Fourth Amendment over the cameras’ supposed benefit. Since 2023, Pinal County has used Flock data in just thirty criminal cases, a rate of less than one a month, demonstrating again the stark difference between Flock’s claims and practical reality.

On the least coast, the state’s war on kids and the future of the human species continues with a proposal by Arizona’s very own Comrade Gallego that the US follow the tyrannical lead of Australia, France, and the UK by attempting to ban access to social media for those under the age of 16. He should know better. Fortunately we have a First Amendment in this country to kill any such attempt.

While Gallego is busy posturing and pandering to the rest of the Leninists in his party, let is not forget what this whole so-called “online child safety” push is really about: increasing violence in American society, and thereby the role of the coercive state as controller of violence, by trying to cut off kids’ exposure to sexuality, and putting a quiet end to much of journalism by tying all online identities to legal identities. No more whistleblowing, no more leaks. It’s been the dream of the bureaucracy since social media came into existence.

Meanwhile, in the People’s Republic of New York, school districts are now attempting to make homeschooling more difficult for families by imposing administrative policies requiring certain tests to be administered by highly-paid professional administrators rather than parents. Legal action backed by HSLDA is in the offing. At the higher levels, Vanderbilt University is staging a xenophobic attack on academic freedom in which university administrators are attempting to elevate the promotion of nationalism above pure intellectual inquiry as the purpose of a university, and the University of Michigan’s administrators have lost their collective mind and will no longer grade incoming freshmen in order to pander to their emotional cowardice.

Culture consists of information contained in human brains and the transmission of that information from one generation to the next. Human culture, and the ability to have it, is the only thing that distinguishes humans from non-human organisms. When culture ceases to exist, humanity ceases to exist.

I was simultaneously insulted and complimented this week when I was told that I have no fear and that a certain other person finds that quality terrifying.

No, I have fear. I fear many things. But I am a human being. I will not let that fear control my choices or my actions, which are under the control of my rational moral sense. I will choose to walk towards a risk and face off against the guy twice my size and get back on the horse, because rejection of fear through principle and determination is the human and right thing to do.

As the film version of TE Lawrence says so captivatingly, “The trick, William Potter, is not minding that it hurts.”

And what is a person who chooses fear, who chooses mechanical response in place of thought? Such a person chooses, impossibly, to attempt to reject their humanity for animalism.

Down the ages, there has been a word for such a person—coward—and in whatever language may be used, that word has often been the most severe term of opprobrium that the language has possessed.

“Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.”