Landowners sue city for $1.7M

The Verde Valley, unlike Sedona, celebrated Independence Day and 250 years of giving the finger to government with some good old-fashioned pyromania and a Concert in the Park in Clarkdale featuring the Rhythm Edition Band of Phoenix. The band’s vocals could charitably be described as less than perfect, with their instrumental playing carrying the evening, but they put their own fun, optimistic twist on a wide variety of numbers and styles. “Proud to be an American” was inadvertently turned into an ironic self-commentary when the singer spent almost the entire song off key and forgetting the lyrics. Conversely, lead vocalist Gloria Robles did ample justice to Aretha Franklin’s “Respect” and “Think” as well as blasting through “Firework” with abandon and providing a bluesy, cabaret-style “Route 66.” “Footloose” was received with the most enthusiasm of the first half of the show, and the band delivered the Isley Brothers’ “Shout” with a manic energy that got the dance floor seething. Unfortunately, there was no Brooks & Dunn or Martina McBride, whose “Independence Day” might as well be the anthem of this season’s primary campaign in Sedona:

Let freedom ring!

Let the white dove sing!

Let the whole world know that today is a day of reckoning!

Let the weak be strong!

Let the right be wrong!

Roll the stone away!

Let the guilty pay!

It’s Independence Day!

Cottonwood deserves a hearty round of applause for refusing to knuckle under to the cowardice of other Verde Valley communities that are betraying their Western heritage by putting on a full-throated fireworks spectacular right after the Clarkdale concert. As you came down the hill from Clarkdale, you could see the smoke from the explosions shaping itself into the very form of the eagle-in-flight that has adorned American official documents for two centuries. Just like in the old days, there were kids and families stopped in the streets looking up at the skies with wonder and delight. They got to enjoy a good, long forty minutes or so of pyromania like we all used to have in our backyards before fear became America’s ruling emotion.

Exercising our humanity is about exercising our courage rather than our fear, and, in the ultimate sense, deliberately walking into danger in order to demonstrate that we are in control and we are not animals. Cottonwood seems to have understood this lesson and what it means to be human, or perhaps they simply haven’t forgotten it yet. Sedona at present is a lost cause.

Surround-sound specialist Koz Mraz presented his first classical-themed surround-sound concert at the Mary D. Fisher Theatre on Thursday, beginning with some Gregorian chant from Consortium Vocale recorded in Oslo Cathedral, the effect of which was to recreate the sense of the space’s scale magnificently, making the audience feel it in their chests. The main part of the program consisted of Holst’s The Planets, as performed by the Royal Scottish National Orchestra, and one of the best moments of the evening was the sound system’s effectiveness at rendering the extreme subtlety of the opening of the first movement, “Mars.” The advance of the trumpets hit the listeners with a physical wash, as if simulating the sensation of piloting a spaceship; as the audience recognized, this single movement, penned at the very dawn of the twentieth century, is the progenitor of every other piece of epic film and science fiction music from Korngold to (Verde Valley School alumnus) Horner to Williams. Every one of the greatest ideas expressed by those composers is encapsulated in the first seven minutes of Holst’s suite. During the second movement, “Venus,” it became clear that the voices of the winds was carrying better than those of the violins, from which the sound was more concentrated and which required comparatively more volume to achieve the same sonority. The flutes and horns in particular came off as very enveloping. “Mercury” saw the presentation revealing the jester-like tricks of Holst’s writing in a way that made it very easy to get lost in the flow of images resulting from the swift musical interplay. The RSNO demonstrated good ability to hold a quick tempo in the “Jupiter” movement rather than milking it for ponderousness, with the slow majesty of the second section moving the audience to gasps of appreciation. In “Saturn,” the brass were clear and surprisingly light, not overburdened, and the seascape section a lovely immersion where the strings flowed in and out of the horns. There was no turning down the power of the trumpet blast that opens “Uranus” on this occasion as it filled and almost shook the theatre with a pounding like that of stallions; in complete contrast, “Neptune,” ironically, was full of atmosphere even as it had to be devoid of atmosphere; when the chorus entered, one readily pictured Esther Williams’s backups. The evening closed with Brahms’s German Requiem performed by the Cleveland Orchestra under Franz Welser-Most, which made the audience breathe with the singers in a profound rolling surge that avoided ultimate despair, providing a sense of immense omnipresence and accentuating the crisp triumph of the close.

It may be slow for the summer, but guitarist Steve Estes will play the Mary D. Fisher Theatre on July 13. “I Love You, You’re Perfect, Now Change” is running at Theatrikos in Flagstaff through July 26, and Clarkdale’s next Concert in the Park is coming up on August 1.

Paging the violin-playing detective: Down under, the Canberra Youth Orchestra is trying to identify definitely the origins of an eighteenth-century violin recently donated to the ensemble, which bears a label—a fact almost more deceptive than otherwise—declaring it to be the work of Spain’s greatest luthier, Jose Contreras. After restoration, the instrument is slated to become a scholarship violin for the orchestra’s concertmasters and soloists. These tales of mysterious masterpieces kicking around in someone’s attic for generations never seem to end. Back east, Karin Canellakis, sister of Chamber Music Sedona director Nick Canellakis, has made her Carnegie Hall debut with the National Youth Orchestra in an extremely strange program: Barber, Gershwin, and Bartok. Is this what programmers think young musicians want to play? Seems highly unlikely.

Turning from the Yavapai to the Coconino County side of city of Sedona litigation, the dust from the debacle of the Forest Road project still hasn’t settled a year later. 741 Forest Road LLC, a holding company owned by the Bowers family, which holds title to the four parcels carved out of a single previous parcel bisected by the road, is suing the city in superior court for breach of contract as a result of the city’s failure to meet the terms of its settlement agreement in the previous eminent domain suit.

The Bowers family filed suit on March 30. Their complaint notes that the holding company entered into a development agreement with the city on September 30, 2022, which allowed the city to dispose of backfill material on the property, provided that city staff also installed a drain pipe, constructed a rock wall and safety railing, and completed the work in accordance with the agreed-upon site plan, including compaction of the backfill and placement of any boulders greater than 24 inches in diameter at least six feet beneath the lot surface. Per the agreement, approval of whether the work had been done correctly rested with the property owners.

The lawsuit discloses that city staff first tried to declare substantial completion of the relevant portion of the project on October 17, 2024, at which point the family objected to the decision on the grounds that they had not even been informed of the work in question and that the work that had been done did not meet the conditions outlined in the development agreement. City staff then tried again to issue a notice of completion on July 3, 2025, couched in general terms related to the opening of the road. The owners notified the city within the required thirty-day window that, once again, staff’s work did not comply with the development agreement. An outside engineer retained by the owners found eighteen problems with city staff’s construction work on the Bowers property, including deficiencies likely to lead to near-term erosion. The suit further notes that staff’s so-called erosion control measures on the property did not comply with their own LDC.

As if that wasn’t enough, the suit continues, Fann Contracting continued to use the 741 Forest Road property as a construction staging area without permission, in violation of the development agreement, for twelve months beyond the time period during which it was authorized to do so. The Bowers suit demands $85,233.84 in compensation for the illegal use of the property, as well as $50,000 as a reasonable sum for attorneys’ fees, $1,656,763.84 in damages resulting from the city’s breach of its contract, and costs.

On May 22, city staff replied via their outside attorneys, Sims Mackin Ltd of Phoenix, with a motion to dismiss the suit with prejudice on the grounds that the suit had not been filed within the one-year statute of limitations and that the plaintiffs had not complied with the notice of claim requirements. Apart from the fact that the suit clearly states that the city was served with a notice of claim, to which the plaintiffs received no response, the city’s own motion argues that the date of completion for Forest Road was July 3, 2025. The statute of limitations didn’t run out until last Friday—three months after the plaintiffs filed their suit. I realize that Comrade Christianson isn’t a very good lawyer, and that city staff are very, very bad at math, but this is just silly.

City staff have requested and received permission to delay filing their next reply in support of their motion to dismiss until July 24.

Years and years ago, as they reckon time within the Quadrilateral, a French tourist in Sedona, one Mme. Frederique Saphores-Baudin, cut her hands on the median fence in the middle of SR 89A while attempting to pass a bag across it to M. Baudin, and subsequently sued the city for medical expenses and pain and suffering, arguing that she was in effect an invited guest of the city while traveling within it and that the city had a duty to remove any sharp edges from a metal object placed in public. The suit was first filed on August 3, 2023, almost one year after Mme. Saphores-Baudin’s encounter with the fence, and it’s still out there going strong.

Per standard procedure, city staff disclaimed all responsibility via contract attorneys Doyle Hernandez Millam of Phoenix. So did Eagle Mountain Construction Company, which was dragged into the Baudins’ second amended complaint. In February 2025, Eagle Mountain in turn pulled Kimley-Horn into the menage on the grounds that Kimley-Horn, the city’s favorite contractor, had designed the fence, and in May of that year, city staff obligingly filed a third-party complaint against Kimley-Horn. Eagle Mountain next added subcontractor Page Steel Inc. as a party to the suit—it’s getting very crowded in that Uptown median—claiming that if any negligence had occurred, it could only have occurred as a result of Page Steel’s failure to provide appropriate steel panels for the project. Each new addition to the suit has denied everything and blamed others.

Per the sixth—sixth!—scheduling order issued in the case, discovery is now expected to be complete by October 30, with a trial to take place after March 8 of next year.

The sheer Frenchness of the case is an inspiration both to recall one of Voltaire’s greatest lines—“from time to time the English find it necessary to shoot one of their admirals for the encouragement of the others”—and to reflect upon its broader local applicability. For instance, we now have the lawsuit of Shelia McCollum, who, on October 17, 2024, “was lawfully walking on the sidewalk in front of Renee Taylor Jewelry in Sedona when her foot became caught in an uneven or raised section of the sidewalk, causing her to trip and fall. As a result, plaintiff sustained severe and debilitating injuries…At the time, no warning signs or markings were in place to alert plaintiff of the dangerous condition of the sidewalk.” What does she want next, a sign warning her it could be dangerous to breathe the air?

McCollum’s suit, filed last October 5, demands that the city pay her medical expenses as well as compensation for anguish endured. City staff, in their October 23 reply via contract attorneys Doyle Hernandez Millam of Phoenix, admitted nothing and denied everything, and in a March 23 filing, made counter-allegations, throwing blame on Renee Taylor for failure to report the sidewalk’s condition and Precision Concrete Cutting for previously having done work in the area. Discovery in the case is currently proposed to be completed by October 6, with a trial to follow in February 2027.

As an alternative to all of this, the city could just take out the wasteful median and use the space reclaimed to put back the second northbound lane through Uptown, thereby solving much of the traffic backup down the hill. That, naturally, would make too much sense. The need to control individual behavior is more important to these psychopaths than the functioning of the city’s traffic network.

Meanwhile, city staff are still facing and creating problems as a result of their insistence on pursuing anti-STR policies that lead to apparent conflicts with state law. Randy and Kelli Morris of 485 Van Deren filed suit on June 24 against the city for denying them an STR license for one of the buildings on their property. When given a permit to convert their garage to an ADU in 2016, the Morrises received the permit on the condition that the ADU not be used for short-term rentals. The suit argues that while the restriction was accepted at the time the permit was issued, at which time the city was permitted to regulate STRs, it was never recorded as a deed restriction against the property and is therefore no longer enforceable. It further contends that after the state of Arizona preempted city STR regulation in 2017, the city’s attempts to regulate the STR use of the property likewise became unenforceable.

In 2024, the Morrises stated, they received permits to operate the two structures as STRs after moving away from the property, and used them as such until December 2025, when city staff denied renewal of the permit for the converted garage in an attempt to enforce the 2016 condition of approval regardless of state preemption. The Morrises are demanding declaratory relief recognizing their right to use their land in accordance with state law.

This is hardly the first case of the city refusing to respect the grandfathered status of a property resulting from its own administrative errors. They’re all over town. Desperate people have no respect for the law. Speaking of which…

To add to the city’s other legal embarrassments, Judge John Napper has now put the cherry on top of the great big ice cream sundae that was the city’s defeat in the Cultural Park suit by ordering the city to pay the Save Sedona committee’s fees and costs. The fees come to $33,872.50 and the costs to $320.69—all of which ultimately will come out of our pockets. Residents are already pointing out that the councilors who voted to sue their constituents should be morally obligated to repay these sums themselves. Personally. And they’re right. It’s high time that state statute is changed to abolish the corporate immunity given to members of public bodies acting in their official capacity when they are proven to have acted inappropriately and misused their positions. With it can go the scam of insuring officials against liability. The public shouldn’t have to foot the bill for the misconduct of the people who are supposed to be the responsible ones. Instead, when a public official or employee does something dumb at a cost to the public treasury, they should have to make the loss good. It would be against the law for Comrade Whitehorn to take $100,000 out of the city’s funds to spend on a whim of her own, and she would have to make restitution. Well, council just took more than that out of the city’s funds, all told, to spend on a whim of their own, and the court has ruled that their action was as legally unjustified as the finance director robbing the till would be. The same principle of restitution should apply. Restitution and compensation, after all, are the principles on which traditional concepts of justice has always been founded.

Also, let’s not forget that so-called deterrent factor of which comrades Jablow, Foley, Dowell, and others are so enamored: If public officials actually had to fear the immediate personal consequences of their misconduct, they might be less likely to commit misconduct.

What would it look and feel like to be a renter whose landlord was the Sedona Soviet Republic? That’s becoming clearer with a look at the city’s tenant selection plan for the Villas on Shelby project, which has been developed and is being administered by their agents at Kay-Kay Realty, a Scottsdale, not a Sedona, firm. As defined on page one of the plan, any family admitted to a unit for which they do not meet the occupancy standards must expect to be uprooted and told to move to another unit at the landlord’s decision. A two-bedroom unit will not be rented to a single person and a four-bedroom unit will not be rented to fewer than four people—except that there are no two-bedroom or four-bedroom units in Villas on Shelby. Where did they copy and paste this bit from? Per criterion number six, students are generally prohibited from renting at all, unless they are married, producing children, or enrolled in a job training program, thereby making them economically more valuable to the coercive state, or unless, and this is an odd one, “a member of the household had, at some time in their life, been in foster care.” Excuse me? Now we have official discrimination in favor of those who were the victims of the state’s horribly abusive foster care system? Is this discrimination intended as a form of belated, diluted compensation for the rapes and abuses that occurred within that system and because of that system? What a bizarre reason for special treatment utterly divorced from any economic consideration.

The acceptance and rejection criteria make clear the degree to which the busybodies at Kay-Kay Realty will be prying into the applicants’ personal lives, including efforts to determine their “housekeeping habits at prior residences” and whether they have ever disturbed their neighbors. Reading the list, one feels like Bob Hope as AJ Niles, dropped into the stifling suburbia of postwar America. Oh, and being a “current drug user not in treatment” is a requirement that, given its literal wording, technically excludes any user of legal as well as illegal drugs, including caffeine, alcohol, cannabis, tobacco, and prescription medications.

However, the qualification score sheet is where things get really interesting and where the mindset of the people who planned this project becomes still more obvious. Contrary to some rumors swirling in the community, being unemployed or a panhandler does not appear to be a sought-after quality for tenants by city staff; the scorecard indicates that unemployed applicants will automatically receive 150 negative preference points. Those who have been self-employed for less than a year will receive 50 negative points, while those who have held the same job for a year will receive 100 points and those who have done so for more than two years will receive 150 points.

But wait—it is clearly, according to Kay-Kay Realty and the city, better to receive than to give, to be a non-worker of another type rather than an established worker, as both those who are retired and those who are disabled will automatically receive 150 points, shooting them to the top of the list ahead of young workers. Individuals who are receiving a Section 8 federal voucher and whose income is high enough will also receive 100 preference points, as will, curiously, those who have already accumulated a year’s rent in liquid assets. That one is another criterion clearly more tailored to the retiree than the worker. Similarly, having once owned a home will give an applicant 50 preference points, and, in a related requirement, having a credit score over 700 will gain an applicant 400 points. A history of noise complaints or of being dirty, if Kay-Kay can identify that in someone’s background, will count for 250 negative points apiece. Being a college graduate will gain an applicant a mere 50 preference points.

This isn’t a workforce housing program; it’s a scheme to bring more non-workers, not more young people, to Sedona. It is every bit as much a bait-and-switch as the transformation of the supposed “workforce housing” at the Cultural Park into market-rate housing with a mere five percent of workforce units. Let us never forget that the current council has zero intention of actually encouraging divergent-thinking, innovative, ambitious young workers to move to Sedona. That would upset the pot. No, the goal here is, as always, to gerrymander Sedona in ways that the council thinks will be most likely to attract individuals of the correct income levels and backgrounds required to keep voting them back into office: retired big-city Democrats fallen on hard times and grateful to their official saviors who will woo them with materialism. This is playing electoral politics with the city’s housing budget.

As reviewed at last week’s housing fantasy meeting, the city cannot require that Villas on Shelby units, which were constructed with federal funding, be rented exclusively to those who are already residing or employed within Sedona. City staff plan to use that limitation on federally-funded projects as a justification for pushing further city purchases of private land in order to remove it from the market and impose their own desirability criteria on any residences subsequently constructed.

Where, oh where, is the white Lexus? Per Sedona police, an unknown woman has been driving around in a white Lexus on her way to her avocation of stealing the Sedona Residents First slate’s signs. She’s been caught on video snatching them from in front of a local gallery and a police report has been filed. Expect to hear that charges are being pressed when the snatcher is found.

DORR affiliates have also apparently stolen most of Small-Town Sedona’s signs that were previously posted along SR 89A. Strange; we’ve somehow managed to avoid stealing any of theirs. Perhaps that’s how it works when the people on your team are capable of distinguishing between ethics and expedience. Once campaign season is over, we’ll count up how many are left and calculate how many the dirty Democrats swiped.

Remember that Phoenix is getting sued for violating residents’ religious protections under the First Amendment thanks to its new anti-charity ordinance? Now it emerges that Phoenix city staff conducted a five-month-long survey of public opinion on the proposal from January to May—and nearly 70 percent of respondents opposed the proposed ordinance in spite of the bureaucrats’ efforts to slant the questions and responses in their favor. Only 28 percent of respondents expressed support. So what did Phoenix bureaucrats do? Naturally, they pushed the proposal through anyway with a disdain for the public will that would have done Sedona’s city council proud. We know all about ignoring public opinion and skewing survey results up here, don’t we? Come to think of it, so does the Catholic Church. You may recall that back in 2021, Pope Francis revoked his predecessor’s, “God’s Rottweiler’s,” broad permission for celebration of the Tridentine Mass on the grounds that it was causing disunity and division in the church. Four years later, it emerged that a majority of the church’s bishops had supported retention of the Latin mass on the basis of feedback from their parishoners—and Francis wasn’t the least bit interested. When you know, you know, just like George W.

In another great moment for the First Amendment, the District of Columbia has been forced to agree to pay a $50,000 settlement to a local artist, Sam O’Hara, whom it unlawfully detained. His “crime”? Playing the “Imperial March” from Star Wars on his cellphone while following a National Guard patrol around the city. After one of the snowflakes in camouflage got his feelings hurt by the poignancy of the commentary, he complained to DC’s finest, who handcuffed O’Hara for fifteen minutes without legal cause. But hey, a soldier-boy’s hurt feelings. That soldier-boy, Devon Beck of Ohio, is still facing a separate and personal suit for his actions. O’Hara also expressed dissatisfaction that the settlement is coming out of taxpayer funds: “Those who actually violated my constitutional rights should be the ones paying the price, like taking the money from their pensions. That’s what real accountability looks like.”

Let us never forget that all police dream of being thought police, of PreCrime and the wiping clean of any ability of the proles to disagree with them or make work for them in the first place. Also, that line “following a National Guard patrol around the city” brings back memories of a much older line, one that appeared in the early constitutions of Pennsylvania and North Carolina:

As standing armies in time of peace are dangerous to liberty, they ought not to be kept up.

As if we needed further reminders that this message must be enforced relentlessly, a New York resident, David Streever, is now suing DHS for violating his First Amendment rights after he emailed the agency’s director to predict that the director would be tormented by his own conscience one day and the director responded by siccing agents on Streever to threaten him, on paper, with an unspecified violation of federal law and demand that he stop exercising his right to free speech. The threat included the phrase, “Receipt of this notice will be taken into consideration, should you continue to be involved in any criminal activities described above.” “Continue to be involved in”? It’s always handy when the bureaucrats give away that they have no interest in the rule of law or in the principle of innocent until proven guilty and are perfectly ready to act as judge, jury, and executioner themselves with zero regard for the Fifth Amendment. Does wonders for the believability of the myth of bureaucratic benevolence. Streever is being represented by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, which, you may recall, successfully sued Surprise over the city council’s attempts to censor public speech.

Wait a second...wasn’t it pretty recently that a member of the Sedona city council used his official position to demand that a member of the public shut up about a particular type of speech? And here other government officials are being sued for exactly the same thing. If only there were lawyers on council.

Meanwhile, in Suffolk, Virginia, an Air Force engineer is being prosecuted for allegedly destroying Flock spycams around the region over a period of six months last year. He’s pleading not guilty, but has also called the cameras “unconstitutional and a violation of his and others’ Fourth Amendment rights.” It’s high time we made jury nullification great again. The people, not a gang of psychopathic elitists, are the ultimate arbiters of law in a democratic society.

Another (appropriately) small win for minimalism: new research just presented at the Society for Experimental Biology’s conference in Florence has shown that catnip oil at a 6 percent concentration is as effective as Deet at repelling mosquitos, with a 2 percent concentration being nearly as effective as triple the dosage. Unsurprising, of course, to all of those gardeners who have been making bug repellents out of plants in the mint family for thousands of years. Once again we are reminded that perfectly effective remedies grow in the backyard—if the traditional knowledge of how to use them hasn’t been removed by the state indoctrination system, if the awareness of their effectiveness hasn’t been undermined by state propaganda, and if we’re allowed to have backyards by the psychopaths who want us to remain miserably dependent upon them. If opium poppies were still a regular feature of the garden, the illegal drug trade would not exist.

With reference to the continuing implosion of the human mind caused by the developed world, the OECD’s 2023 survey of adult skills across thirty-eight member nations is getting some attention after the media are belatedly realizing it revealed that 14 percent of American college students can only read at or below the level of a ten-year-old, and 15 percent are doing math at the same level. Of course, it could be worse; we could be in Israel, where the figures are 20 percent and 21 percent, respectively. Expect the slope to sharpen in the next ten years without corrective action.