SPD plans more drone surveillance

The Fine Art Museum of Sedona held its inaugural First Friday at the Sedona Heritage Museum following its relocation to launch a new exhibit, “Mastery in Motion,” featuring the combined works of John Soderberg and Jill Trenholm and including a number of Trenholm’s interpretations of Soderberg’s works, with a small version of his most famous, Merlin, among them. Special attention is suggested to the exquisite “Epiphany 2.” The exhibit will run through August 31.

Last Saturday’s Concert in the Park over in Clarkdale, featuring Poppy Harpman and The Storm, turned out to be as much a dance as a music event. The band emphasized their originals over covers, many of which had a very similar—and sensual—style. Poppy himself set the pace with “Little Black Dress,” a mellow tune heavily reliant on the lyrics, which he openly admitted was inspired by his wife: “We went to Vegas for our honeymoon and they thought she was a hooker.” “Baby’s Coming Home” alluded to the imminent return of one’s beloved “on the nine o’clock train,” incorporating hints of matrimonial organ through which the kids in the crowd danced like fireflies with their glowsticks. Another number was a brazen, scorching summer song almost too hot for the cool greenery of the town park, but the steaminess of the lyrics was apparently attributable to the object of the lyricist’s affections waltzing down the street and heating up the situation. Couples kept busy dipping in response and gave the song especially enthusiastic applause. One of the group’s originals not written by Poppy himself, “See You Sunday,” was a chill sizzle by the group’s organist, Jeff Lucas, with, naturally, a significant role for the electric organ, which again kept suggesting church music in the background and filling up the dance floor.

On covers, the group gave a vigorous performance of the Georgia Satellites’ “Don’t Give Me No Lies” and a great rendition of the instrumental passages in “Caught in a Crossfire.” The dance floor was hopping to their version of Stevie Wonder’s “I Wish,” while for “Walking the Dog” by Rufus Thomas, it was the dancers who couldn’t keep up with the short, cheeky, fun melodies. Bill Withers’s “Use Me” combined strong eroticism with a classic guitar sound, the band practically rocking out during the extended bridge.

Let us keep in mind that we could be having these kinds of concerts here at our own Cultural Park, except that city staff are busy trying to destroy both the Cultural Park and summer events in town in their desire to drive away young people and fun and turn Sedona into a more plastic retirement community. While there are lunatics in town, such as Comrade Dunn, who claim that it would be impossible to use the Cultural Park even on summer nights, on Saturday, the temperatures were almost too cool in Clarkdale, a mere 79 degrees with a slight breeze at 9 PM.

Don’t miss tomorrow’s Community Jubilee at Posse Grounds, brought to you courtesy of your candidates for city council, followed by the Sedona Dance Project performing at Sedona United Methodist Church. Concerts in the Park in Clarkdale are due back next Saturday, when the Red Canyon Band will play country—yeehaw!—and both Clarkdale and Camp Verde, unlike Sedona, have musical events planned for Independence Day. And stay tuned for the Sedona Symphony’s announcement of its new season. If you’re up north this weekend, the Elden Brass Quintet will be playing at the Museum of Northern Arizona.

Small-Town Sedona will be hosting presentations at the Community Library Sedona on June 13 and 15 to discuss why home rule is the least desirable of the four options that Sedona has to fund its municipal government and how we could bring back some fiscal responsibility to this town. Donna Joy Varney and myself will be the speakers. The presentation portion of each event is expected to last for the first hour, with discussion to follow during the second hour. Note-taking materials will be provided. The presentation will also be filmed and made available via Youtube and Facebook for later viewing. If we can’t cover all questions during the events, we’ll take them in writing and film a separate response for later distribution as well.

That gang calling themselves the Sedona city council heard a presentation on their new police department strategic plan from their California consultants on Tuesday, and the so-called plan’s most concrete feature is a proposal that the city step up its drone surveillance of residents. While most of the plan’s conclusions and recommendations amounted to nothing more than meaningless bureaucratic buzzwords that would not affect the average person in any way, one objective tells us exactly what SPD is eager to bring us next in combination with all their license plate readers: “Enhance SPD’s Drone Program. Streamline the department’s software, improve the technology, and expand the program usage.” How about taking their drones away completely instead?

City consultant Jarrod Burguan spent some time singing Kumbaya about how all the city’s paramilitary employees are on the same team and feel well supported by one another, which is quite different from the strong minority view that exists in reality within city staff and SPD as revealed by employee exit interviews. He gave the game away when he admitted the initial response rate for the anonymous employee surveys his group conducted was less than 30 percent and that Comrade Foley had to apply pressure to get the response rate above 60 percent. “The amount of frustration that I sensed here was surprising,” Burguan said, without clarifying whether that dissatisfaction was among staff or the public or both.

Inevitably, the department that is growing at the fastest rate in the city made more pitches for more personnel, with Comrade Spickard whining about “the very real challenges the department has faced…staffing shortages…the increasing demands” in spite of the fact that the department’s workload has been declining, along with population and crime, since 2008. Foley similarly mourned that “law enforcement is not something that’s being sought after because of social media and the critiques that we’re constantly under”—how shocking that someone would be repelled by your casual embrace of violence—and started begging for permission to “over-hire” to avoid having too many people give notice all at once. In pure idiocy, Foley claimed that the SPD’s turnover rate was “well below the national average” and then turned out to be unable to produce turnover numbers for Sedona to prove her case. She then lobbied to bring in a consultant to implement the plan.

“If we could get rid of some outside distractions, we could accomplish so much more,” Foley gushed, re-grounding herself in a heavily armed thug’s narrative of being constantly under siege and then telling the council, “Don’t worry if you want to add a bonus to me, that’s great.”

Much of the discussion regarding SPD staff increases revolved around council and staff’s explicit desire to push city propaganda to fight what Spickard called “the misinformation wars” on social media. She used the phrase “promoting the positive stories that are happening”—which is nearly identical to the dictionary definition of propaganda. Burguan suggested a two-to-three-person dedicated police communications team to sell the Sedona public on the wonders of violence. One of his recommendations was that the department “enhance the Sedona police brand”—are they on crack? Use our tax dollars to sell us on how wonderful it is to be brutalized by them? The Golgafrinchans want to know if fire should be fitted nasally again! He also proposed a traffic enforcement plan to sell the public on the concept that SPD was doing something about traffic, while Foley revealed that she is planning to spend public money on designing new graphics for all of her vehicles.

Perhaps as a very roundabout response to the way Foley plays with her subordinates, Burguan suggested but did not stress the idea that SPD develop a “succession plan.”

Foley had apparently recruited three partisans for the occasion to criticize criticisms of her during the public forum, with one pitying the city’s brutal thugs and demanding the council protect the feelings of its official murderers against First Amendment-protected criticism; another referred to members of the community criticizing their public employees as “a mob filled by hate”; and a third, who openly identified as a forty-year California cop, told the council to “resist giving a voice to a disgruntled few” by reforming the department. Fortunately for the public, and unfortunately for the city parasites, the city has no way to “protect” their employees from public critique, thanks to the First Amendment, and the beatings will continue until morale improves through the departure of all those employees who are worthy of public critique.

Of course the council supported implementing the plan unanimously.

At the end of the discussion, Comrade Pfaff lost his conkers and went on a mini-rant about how it was “asinine” to recognize that the existence of police and military forces are inconsistent with basic moral values, having clearly never read the Gospels. He then had the audacity to demand that a member of the public—yours truly—stop exercising his right to free speech, in this case to proclaim the Gospel, simply because Pfaff finds being presented with basic facts about morality to be offensive to himself. Well, then, he will be made uncomfortable until he finds a conscience. From now on, there will be reference made to the immorality of violence and the moral condition of those who support violence at every council meeting going forward for Pfaff’s especial pleasure. Carthago delenda est.

The simple fact of the matter is that Derek Pfaff is not used to having someone make a moral absolutist argument against his self-interested expedience and it absolutely freaks him out. He also seemed pretty eager to show off his total ignorance of the long history of advocacy of nonviolence as an alternative to the coercive state. For an initial look, I recommend Tolstoy’s The Kingdom of God is Within You and Cecil John Cadoux’s The Early Christian Attitude to War. For a taste of the moral irritation the moral bankrupt is feeling, try Theodora Wilson Wilson’s The Last Weapon. Or, for a simple, direct approach that pointedly addresses Pfaff’s spineless utilitarianism, Adin Ballou’s Non-Resistance in Relation to Human Governments is perhaps the most striking text that takes on the core issue here. Or keep it even simpler and check out this quote from Dorothy Day.

But do go ahead, Derek. Do stand up and tell us all how good violence is for its own sake. His discomfort recalls that of your old college professors on seeing you attempt to take dangerous ideas out of books and implement them in the social world.

I’m actually delighted that an elected official is so far forgetting himself as to attempt to suppress a constituent’s speech with a command from the dais. It makes these people’s stupidity and true colors even clearer.

City attorney Comrade Christianson will be departing on August 13 to move back to Atlanta, indicating the depth of his commitment to Sedona and reminding us once again why the city shouldn’t hire people who aren’t already living here permanently. Comrade Coady will be interim while they hunt for a replacement.

That gang calling themselves the Sedona city council placed another obstacle in the way of housing and of rural and Western values on Tuesday when they appointed Daniel Wiencek to the Planning and Zoning Commission. Wiencek has no background in construction, architecture, or engineering, but rather was on a planning commission for twelve years and a town council for eight back in Ohio, making him suitably house-trained to be acceptable to this council.

Wiencek made it clear that he plans to use his seat on the commission to push an agenda of encouraging high-density construction by outside developers, suggesting a “focus” on “high-density housing.” “It’s the city’s responsibility to facilitate those things, not necessarily do those things,” Wiencek said. “You can manipulate the code to make it easier, more profitable for a developer to come in and build the sort of structures you’re looking for.” He suggested creating a set of alternate standards for high-density housing, being completely unaware that the city’s DIGAH policy already existed; he also admitted to never having attended or watched a P&Z meeting and to never having read the DREAM manual. He also proposed the entire reconstruction of SR 89A to push buildings out to the street and for the elimination of grandfathering older buildings.

A bizarre exchange saw council trying to find out if Wiencek would feel comfortable approving a zone change if he disliked a project. “I’m not sure how to answer that question,” Wiencek said, missing the easy answer completely. “I don’t see why I would have to vote for it if I’m opposed to it…I’m failing to understand why I would be voting for somethng if I’m opposed to it.” Council failed to clarify to him that the commission has no choice but to approve zone change requests if the legal requirements are met regardless of whether or not commissioners like the project, or to mention that commissions and councils are not allowed to find false excuses to contort their dislike into denial.

Council enquired whether Wiencek thought the community plan accurately reflected the community’s values at present. “Depends on whether you read NextDoor or not,” Wiencek deflected, before admitting, “It’s been so long that I looked at it that I don’t know that I can really answer the question…I interviewed for this position when Moriarty was mayor,” and then said yes anyway, claiming the plan reflected the will of the “silent majority.” Kinsella expressed exasperation that he didn’t answer the question. Asked by Comrade Fultz to define the “hopes and desires” of the “silent majority,” Wiencek diverted the conversation to an inaccurate and deceptive attack on the future of the Sedona Cultural Park, claiming that the “silent majority” “seems to be coalescing around some housing is appropriate there, but also a community center and community space,” thereby misrepresenting the public’s actual views, which are for no housing and all community space, in a way consistent with the sitting council’s agenda.

When asked if he was familiar with open meeting laws in Arizona, Wiencek replied convincingly, “I’m gonna say yes because I assume they’re very similar to those in Ohio.” Do these people realize how clueless they’ll sound when they apply for this position? They could go back and watch the previous interviews and get the questions and learn. When he was pressed specifically on his awareness of the meeting laws versus executive sessions, he admitted, “I’m gonna say no.”

Naturally, with qualifications like this, the council appointed him unanimously. Wiencek will miss two of the next three P&Z meeting dates because he will be vacationing abroad. Why even bother?

Rumor on the street is that council and staff’s efforts to develop the 2411 SR 89A property as high-density apartments, which have so far been stymied by, among other things, the fact that fire code requires two entrances and exits, have now escalated to threatening to seize part of the Wyndham via eminent domain in order to provide the necessary infrastructure for their pretend workforce housing. Did we really ever doubt that this council has fantasies of seizing single-family homes to turn them into apartments in the years to come?

The Sedona Residents First slate of candidates for council held a meet-and-greet at Vino di Sedona on Monday, during which a number of audience members seemed chiefly concerned with how the candidates felt about home rule, in spite of the fact that the slate is running on an explicit platform of democratically implementing whatever voters decide, unlike the sitting council. Do some of the voters in this town really want to be led by the nose? Are they so committed to preserving bureaucrats’ jobs to allow that consideration alone to determine their vote?

“They’ve made this into a crisis conversation,” Henry Silbiger said. “The best thing you can have is an educated populace making the decision…please go out and make a decision…There’s so much more here than just home rule. I don’t get it.”

Jean Buillet agreed that “it’s not as great a concern as its been presented” and expressed objection to the home rule vote being cast as either “catastrophe or utopia,” adding from his perspective on the budget work group that with the city’s operating budget at $32 million, even if home rule were to fail, the city could “pivot its investments” and cover its existing operations with few cuts.

Lita Boyd described a conversation with Clarkdale mayor Robyn Prudhomme-Bauer; Clarkdale switched to permanent base adjustment from home rule several years ago. “It makes you accountable and it makes you work on the projects you agree to and you stay the course,” Boyd quoted Prudhomme-Bauer before commenting on the larger trend involved: “The cities in Arizona are working their way out of home rule and into permanent base adjustment because you have to have a vision and a plan.”

The audience also appeared to be unhappy that state gift clause requirement prevents the city from just tossing money at the school district. Buillet quipped about doing his part to bring young people back to town with four kids of his own, but added that school enrollment was declining nationwide, in part as a consequence of shrinking populations, and that without immigration, the US population as a whole would have been shrinking for the last thirty-five years.

“We’re asking affluent families to move here and trust a very, very underperforming school district with their kids,” Buillet said, pointing to the number of families sending their kids to Cottonwood.

“We’ve got a major problem with affordability in Sedona, and it’s caused by the city itself,” Rich Gay said on housing. “The city has basically gone out of their way to make this an expensive, painful process. I think we should change that,” pointing out the irony that the city will waive fees for developers but not for individuals. He stressed the need for home ownership and yards for families and for changing the rules to make it possible to build casitas for local workers at $800 per month.

The League of Women Voters candidate forum on Thursday saw more distribution of misinformation from the sitting city councilors and attempted rationality, for the most part, from the Sedona Residents First slate. During the mayoral portion of the evening, Comrade Fultz confessed to having owned a home in Sedona for sixteen years prior to moving here, making him part of the second homeowner problem that causes STR proliferation. “I’ve made mistakes, owned them, learned from them,” Fultz claimed—actually, he hasn’t; we’re still waiting for that apology for the $5,000 toilets and for suing the people who put your butt in that seat.

“Sedona has a critical problem. The current council isn’t listening, yet they want your vote again,” Silbiger summed up the situation effectively. “I am here to listen, and I am here to serve,” adding that “listening to people’s needs and managing disciplined budgets” were the keys to building a successful organization.

“We will bring real discipline to city hall. No more spend because we have it. Fewer outside consultants,” Silbiger added, demanding that the city “cut red tape and simplify processing” in order to build housing with strong aesthetic standards. By contrast, Fultz attempted to cast himself as a supporter of housing on the basis his support for the city’s new housing strategy, which contains no plan to actually build any housing, only a pie-in-the-sky goal. He then declared that “this won’t be the urbanization of Sedona” while defending the continued importation of urban building codes into Sedona. This is, of course, the same guy who has put not one family in a home they own in the last four years.

Asked how the city should work with the Chamber to support small businesses, Fultz had the nerve to suggest that private businesses should start handing over their confidential financial data to the city so it could design its marketing plans on that basis, while Silbiger offered the more realistic perspective that “supporting small business means getting the city out of your way.” On home rule, Silbiger reminded voters that “my job isn’t to dictate how you should vote” and commented that “Sedona is going to be just fine either way….neither outcrome is going to bankrupt or beautiful city or plunge our neighborhoods into chaos.”

Fultz called for ignoring the people’s will in advance with his support for home rule, thereby implicitly declaring that he knows better than his constituents do, and described democratic responsiveness to the voters as “an abdication of leadership.” He stressed that the city needed a large budget so it could continue to do things like taking land out of circulation and increasing the housing shortage.

“Do you want to put at risk so much of what makes Sedona special?” Fultz demanded, effectively stating that what makes Sedona special these days is its bloated budget and abundance of out-of-town bureaucrats.

After Fultz touted the city’s propaganda messaging and its desire to create a presumably exclusionary community calendar, Silbiger responded, “I’m glad to hear you’re going to do something now…We’re in an election year, and now you’re going to engage the community.”

On leadership and fiduciary experience, Silbiger jested that “my experience as far as litigation can’t be as good as the city of Sedona’s…I’m gonna make sure we don’t get sued and not have a situation where litigation is the main thing of our city.” Fultz bragged about having been made a manager straight out of college, when, at age 23, he was managing a hundred union workers for GE and getting to keep his white-collar job even as they were losing their blue-collar jobs. He spoke of his struggles in “motivating” them under such conditions.

Fultz also seized the chance to remind the city’s nonprofits that if home rule were not to be reauthorized, he would vote to revoke their funding out of spite, before adding that it would “create tremendous uncertainty for our staff…these folks are gonna leave.” Exactly. Good riddance to bad rubbish. Bureaucrats are parasites. Getting Sedona back to a small-town environment means getting the bureaucrats out of here. Small towns are run by volunteers, not hired separatists. Silbiger countered by reminding him of the fact that most of the city’s budget is unneeded capital projects.

When Fultz argued, in regard to the Sedona Cultural Park, that “there needs to be something in it for our residents,” Silbiger noted that all Fultz had been able to think of to do with the park so far had been to put a homeless camp on it or sell it to a developer for high-rises. Silbiger pointed out Comrade Allender’s contradictory statements about Sedona’s purported housing need, while Fultz pontificated about how the city should avoid doing restrictive things with regard to housing that might induce the legislature to take away local zoning control—except that that’s exactly what the city of Sedona has been doing for the last decade and more. Fultz also proposed that city staff “curate” tourism with the specific goal of attracting both believers in pseudoscience and those who would merely want to use the city’s shuttle rather than their own cars, as well as reviving the community dinners the chamber hosted decades ago, but this time under city dictation. Silbiger then went off the reservation and called for visitors “to leave their cars behind” and for city staff to create more roads.

Lita Boyd was absent from the candidate forum due to family issues, but sent a statement in which she commented, “I refuse to accept the status quo as the best we can do. For too long we’ve allowed a bureaucratic mindset to replace vision,” and called for auditing the budget, ending litigation against residents, more wildfire safety, and traffic solutions instead of building more roundabouts.

“The people who live and work in this town every day deserve a stronger voice in the decisions that shape it,” Rich Gay told the audience, while Comrade Hauserman bragged about his integration with the existing city bureaucracy. Jean Buillet criticized the city’s “spending decisions driven a lot by ideology rather than sound planning” and declared “a commitment to involving our incredibly talented community in how this city operates.” Comrade Dunn falsely claimed, “I am fact-based,” which might have struck a listener as the biggest lie she had ever told until she followed it up with a comment that she was not afraid to change her mind when better facts were brought forward; she’s never been observed to do that once, although she’s presented with corrections of her falsehoods all the time.

After Dunn called for retention of the city’s onerous land codes and the restriction of home construction to building “that fit the future we imagine”—as well as hypocritically wishing for more festivals while her own staff are trying to drive them out of town—Gay countered by demanding reduced code complexity and reversing the development fee increase for which Dunn and Fultz had voted. “The city’s own rules and fees are the biggest reason new housing cannot be built affordably,” Gay stated. “We first have to change the culture at city hall. Too many residents feel that council and staff pretend to listen and then do what they want anyway.” He suggested training city staff to be helpful and scoring their interactions with residents so staff would be held accountable for poor or rude performance. Buillet noted that Sedona’s future should not be determined by “outside developers or a council that’s lost touch with the people it represents,” opposing high-rise and high-density development. The discriminatory and militaristic Hauserman suggested more “stratified housing.”

On business issues, Buillet was quite clear that “the city needs to seriously improve its process for starting new businesses…You can wait months for the permits needed to open your doors…that’s not a message we need to send to entrepreneurs who want to invest in Sedona.” Dunn falsely claimed that the city council was trying to make it easier for employees and their families to live in Sedona. Gay introduced the ominous language “manage visitation responsibly…avoid negatively affecting the quality of life.”

Hauserman deliciously lost himself a few votes when he decided he was going to talk about how former mayor Comrade Moriarty’s anti-democratic mask mandate was such a great thing for Sedona, and then gave away the falsity of the entire game he and the rest of the Segner Slate are playing when he mentioned that back in the 1940s, Sedona’s first volunteer fire chief was hired by the Chamber. In other words, both marketing and fire suppression in Sedona were once handled competently, privately, and cheaply with zero government involvement. But he and his friends would like us to believe otherwise. This is why you shouldn’t let jet jocks run their mouths; they inevitably shoot themselves down.

Dunn explicitly declared her support for home rule because having millions of dollars floating around loose allowed the city, during her tenure, to tear up streets, persecute people for using their private property, approve more than eighty projects, and engage in more than twenty green fantasy projects, the last claim bringing chuckles from the audience. Hauserman referred to not spending every penny of your income as “fiscal self-sabotage” before proposing giving staff a permanent base adjustment that would keep them from having to seek voter approval for their spending for two or three decades to come. Buillet denounced the “strongest fearmongering campaign I’ve seen from both sides in the thirty years I’ve lived here” and reminded listeners that the city’s operations budget, at $32 million, was “nowhere near the $100 million figure being used to threaten voters.” Both Buillet and Gay stated their commitment to reducing spending regardless of whether home rule passes or fails.

“People that take the time to engage are dismissed,” Gay said with regard to transparency. “There appears to be a sense among some staff that responding to residents takes time away from real work. That attitude needs to change.” In the most important suggestion of the night, he called for the return of citizen commissions, which, unlike work groups, would report directly to council rather than staff and would have their conclusions supported rather than dismissed by staff. “Reestablishing them would give citizens a structured, meaningful way to contribute.” “The messaging is too complicated and too much in legalese and we need to make things a bit simpler,” Buillet said. Hauserman’s contribution was wanting more propaganda in the Snooze; Dunn complained that residents didn’t want to talk to her.

Hauserman eventually reduced his entire candidacy to forcing the city’s useless transit system on residents in order to reduce their freedom of movement, while Dunn made a false claim that Sedona’s small-town infrastructure has to handle big city numbers; she is also interested in eliminating parking at the Chapel of the Holy Cross entirely. Pushing back against their enthusiasm for Leninist centralization, Gay noted that the plan for the proposed bus barn includes a workout room, a wellness room, a quiet room, and a second office for the city’s human resources manager, among other features: “It’s kind of nuts.” He called for a forensic audit of the Forest Road and Uptown garage projects and a hiring moratorium.

The discussion grew ridiculous after Dunn said, with regard to traffic, “We’re working on it,” which provoked the audience to giggles, and then doubled down on her idiocy when talking about evacuation plans: “There are a lot of times we can’t actually show you plans because we don’t want bad actors to know.” Apart from this being as absurd as Comrade Browne’s fantasy that someone might one day want to shoot up Sedona city hall, it’s also ludicrous given its self-contradiction: if you don’t show people the evacuation plans, they can’t evacuate, so why even have a plan? “That’s just kind of weird,” Gay responded. “We need to change that.”

At one point Hauserman made the extraordinary—for him—statement that he believed the citizens could solve any problem. That’s actually true, and they certainly can and always have been able to do so; see Ostrom’s Governing the Commons for further details—but Hauserman also doesn’t believe that and that’s not the platform on which he’s running. His entire life has been based on hierarchy, inequality, dominance, and coercion, and his platform is that he and his fellow psychopaths in their ignorance know best and the rest of us should just shut up and accept our place on the bottom getting screwed. When he referred to the city’s bureaucrats as “smart, capable people,” comments of “Bullshit!” could be heard in the audience.

“We would be going backwards” without an enormous budget, Hauserman lamented. Exactly. We want to go backwards. Everyone who has been in Sedona for decades admits that life was far better here twenty, thirty, and forty years ago. If we want the quality of life and the small-town character to improve again, that means ditching big government, complex infrastructure, and constant projects.

“I don’t love the idea of the city taking the housing fund and giving a lot of incentives to developers and making it really difficult for individual citizens to build their own property,” Buillet pushed, saying that Sedona needs to “simplify the entire process of how people would go about building their own property…they’re not just indentured renters for life.” “I’ve talked to so many people that have told me horror stories about how hard it is to get a permit…it’s really embarrassing that the city has allowed this to go on so long,” Gay agreed. Dunn and Hauserman continued to express an STR obsession.

“I’m not against an amphitheater,” Dunn, the most vociferous advocate of bulldozing the Cultural Park, claimed when the subject rolled around. “I don’t know much—I’m not an engineer—about housing.” Truer words were rarely spoken.

With attendance at the LWV forum below a hundred people, it was unlikely to have made much difference to the election either way. It was disappointing, however, that none of the candidates had the guts to say that the city needs to be out of tourism marketing and management altogether.

Word on the street is that the $49 million placeholder in the FY27 city budget is another staff deception. Apparently the city plans to pay the school district only $10 million for the building—and then spend the rest on other land acquisition projects to prevent private development, contrary to council’s previously-stated and publicly-stated claim that they didn’t want to buy any more land. And indeed, paying attention to comrades Fultz and Dunn’s shifting rhetoric during the campaign, it’s quite clear that they do intend to spend more of our money on “protecting” the land from us who want to use it for houses.

Comrade Pfaff lost even more of his marbles this past weekend in his panic over what he called the “disastrous” possibility of having Sedona’s unnecessarily bloated government stripped back and decided he was going to post a lengthy Facebook denunciation of what he termed yours truly’s “toxic” behavior. What a snowflake term, “toxic”; I have no hesitation personally in calling him “evil.” Pfaff’s original post seems to have vanished somewhere in Zuckerberg’s insatiable maw, but for the sake of the historical record, and, let’s be quite frank, for the titillation of those who enjoy a good Sedona gossip, I’m including it here, along with a few pertinent comments that I never got to make in that other forum. Actually, it makes for an excellent exercise in self-criticism to have other people complain about you and then to examine their complaints to see if there’s any merit in them. It’s always nice when there isn’t.

The rumors going around town about Pfaff’s own personal behavior lately, by the way, are quite heartening.

It is impossible not to be struck lately at how well Jack London depicted the contemporary and timeless attitudes of Sedona’s psychopaths back in 1908 in The Iron Heel, in the words of an oligarch at that time that come equally well from the mouth of an oligarch of this time:

“We will not reply to the bear in words. Our reply shall be couched in terms of lead. We are in power. Nobody will deny it. By virtue of that power we shall remain in power…We have no words to waste on you…The world is ours, we are its lords, and ours it shall remain. As for the host of labor, it has been in the dirt since history began, and I read history aright. And in the dirt it shall remain so long as I and mine and those that come after us have the power. There is the word. It is the king of words—Power. Not God, not Mammon, but Power. Pour it over your tongue till it tingles with it. Power.”

This is precisely the sentiment that Sedona’s council and staff hold towards us. They do not deign to explain to us. If we point out errors in their logic, unmet provisions in their contracts, the absence of evidence for their decisions, or their misallocation of millions, considerations that ought to demand at least some reply or defense, they simply ignore us and move ahead. They are not interested in the right answers or the best answers. They are interested solely in imposing their whims on the basis of the power that they have seized, and they are viciously afraid and angry at the thought of losing that power at the ballot box.

Consider the state of the Sedona paramilitary. Every year, the council asks Comrade Foley if there’s any increase in crime or workload that warrants a staffing or budget increase. Every year, she says there isn’t. And every year, the staffing and budget increases are rubber-stamped as a matter of course, and the information, or rather the absence of information, that would make it clear there is no justification for the decision, is simply not discussed. If someone brings it up during the public forum, it is still not discussed. There is zero interest in data-driven decisions on this council. There is only an interest in power and coercion.

The city of Phoenix is setting itself up for yet another First Amendment defeat with an ordinance passed last month that criminalizes giving food or water to the homeless in city parks without a permit. The Holy Cross Orthodox Church is leading the suit against the new ordinance, which Lance Brace of the church’s outreach ministry stated would “force people of conscience to choose between engaging with our faith and submitting to the law.” The church’s suit further notes that the ordinance is discriminatory as well as a violation of the First Amendment, as the ordinance contains exemptions to exclude family events from being encompassed by its language while specifically targeting charitable and humanitarian events.

A few days ago, in a superb example of meta-illustration, Forbes ran a headline that stated, “Gen Zers are arriving to college unable to even read a sentence.” Presumably the headline was written by a member of this Gen Z, with its mismatched preposition and its split infinitive. One didn’t dare read the story or risk the likelihood of four to six mistakes in the lead. On that note, check out an excellent takedown of the ongoing failure of the public school system by Tyler Jagt in The Chronicle of Higher Education:

In February 2024, Adam Kotsko, who teaches in the Shimer Great Books School at North Central College, wrote in Slate that students who once handled 30 pages of reading per class meeting now seem “intimidated by anything over 10 pages and seem to walk away from readings of as little as 20 pages with no real understanding.” Crucially, he added that this is “not a matter of laziness on the part of the students” but of underlying skills they were never given a chance to build. The Chronicle of Higher Education’s 2024 investigation found the same pattern across institutions as different as the Stevens Institute of Technology and Wellesley College, where the average SAT exceeds 1400. Nicholaus Gutierrez, an assistant professor at Wellesley, told The Chronicle that the baseline for what students consider a reasonable amount of work has dropped so noticeably that he has cut his readings accordingly; a 750-word essay now strikes many students as long…

On the 2011 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) writing assessment, which is the most recent comprehensive writing benchmark, only 24 percent of 12th graders reached the Proficient level, and just 3 percent reached Advanced; another 21 percent scored below Basic. The reading side of the ledger is worse, and getting worse fast: The 2024 NAEP results released in September 2025 show 12th-grade reading scores at the lowest level recorded since the assessment began in 1992. Thirty-two percent of 12th graders now score below NAEP Basic in reading, meaning that, in the assessment’s own language, they likely “cannot draw general conclusions based on concepts presented explicitly in a text.” And yet more than half of these same seniors reported being accepted to a four-year college. That last sentence is the whole problem in one line: We are admitting a cohort that cannot read at a college level and are pretending otherwise.

But don’t worry, I’m sure having the city throw public funds at watering Comrade Swaninger’s fields will fix the reading problems at SRRHS.