Supremes shun Sedona STR suit

The banter between Shondra Jepperson and saxophonist Chris Counelis was on fire Monday night during Counelis’s performance at the Mary D. Fisher Theatre for the In the Living Room Music Series, anchoring a night of laughs that was one of the funniest shows of the year, musical comedy to all intents and purposes.

Counelis, who fingers the tenor sax, was on the road with the Glenn Miller Orchestra back in the late eighties and also put in several years with the revived Artie Shaw Orchestra. He led off with Chick Corea’s “I Can Recall Spain,” which has little obviously Spanish about it apart from its pervading air of manana; Counelis performed it nimbly and accurately, with a solid if not ravishing tone and nice fingerwork. “Not bad,” Susie Shoemaker heckled him humorously from the audience.

For Bobby Timmons’s “Moanin’,” Counelis stepped up his game, making the song into a sexy, cheeky moan exhaled with zest and smoulder, digging into it with enthusiasm and emotion—and no reliance on the sheet music. Lee Morgan’s “Sidewinder” he likewise delivered off the cuff, writhing adeptly like it was still the 1960s at a Pink Panther party. In Duke Ellington’s “In a Sentimental Mood,” Counelis showed off delicacy and subtlety with his adept handling of the rippling passages that required blurringly fast fingerings while still keeping the mood smoky and gentle.

Then Counelis really poured on the charm, cracking open his war chest and offering the audience a round to celebrate his birthday that evening: “Release the Kraken! I’ve already released a lot of it!” They took him up on the offer.

“I have completely lost control of the In the Living Room Music Series. This is good,” Jepperson commented. “This is a first. We have a full bar on the stage of the Mary Fisher Theatre.”

With impeccable timing, Counelis then fired up The Champs’ “Tequila,” which he presented with commitment and even more of a sense of a blast from the past, followed by one of the most recognizable of all sax tunes, that “unusual animal,” the theme from The Pink Panther, capping the spirit of the evening. (For those who have forgotten, four decades ago, Henry Mancini played Poco Diablo and about sixty percent of the people in Sedona went to the show.)

“Do you practice safe sax?” a listener demanded.

“I like to live life on the edge, baby!” Counelis replied.

Clarkdale’s Concert in the Park this weekend will feature Come Back Buddy, and the September 4 show will show off The Naughty Bits. In addition, the Sedona Dance Academy Gala has been announced for August 29 at the Mary D. Fisher Theatre, offering one of the best ways to support real education in this community, aside from buying the library some worthwhile books—more on that later. SDA will also be performing at Fashion Lab Sedona’s upcoming Sustainable Fashion Show, with a routine based on themes from The Devil Wears Prada. Celebrate Sedona will take place on August 21 at the Sedona Arts Center.

The Fine Art Museum of Sedona will be hosting a Curt Walters retrospective from September through November at both the Sedona Heritage Museum and the Sedona Film Festival complex, with First Friday events scheduled for September 4 and October 2 and an opening reception at the museum slated for September 18. “When a fine art museum is established, they become the cultural center of a community…just put that in your head when you’re thinking about the future,” Walters told the city council on Tuesday, reminding them to keep in mind a permanent location for the art museum.

To tide us over until the symphony season starts, and to give more people an idea of what the orchestral rehearsal process can involve, Maestro Will has begun uploading and sharing a series of 1990s documentaries, In Rehearsal, showing conductors working with their ensembles in preparation for performances. So far he’s done Esa Pekka-Salonen with the Los Angeles Philharmonic in Debussy’s “La Mer” and Christoph von Dohnanyi with the Philharmonia Orchestra in Haydn’s Symphony No. 88. This is extremely helpful of him; there are nowhere near enough rehearsal videos out there, especially of Haydn symphonies. Incidentally, at the end of his installment, Dohnanyi delivers an absolutely critical remark:

It’s absolutely almost impossible to write music like this nowadays. This kind of entertaining spirit on this tremendous high level. We don’t own this anymore. This is in the best sense entertainment, as music should be. And this kind of spirit which Haydn offers to us, entertaining us at this very high level, shows us at the same time how much we are missing, how little we have to offer.

He puts his finger on a question I’ve been asking for many years: Why is it seemingly no longer possible to write music like it was still the eighteenth century? Do composers simply choose to discard that idiom, that musical language—or are they incapable of replicating it?

That gang calling themselves the Sedona city council and their Leninist staff have suffered another major defeat in their campaign to take away residents’ private property rights now that the Arizona Supreme Court has refused to hear the city’s appeal in the Oak Creek Hospitality suit against the city, which will allow the Oak Creek Mobilodge units to become eligible for STR use. Oak Creek Hospitality was supported throughout the case by the Goldwater Institute.

On November 26 last year, the Court of Appeals overturned the city’s initial victory in county court, ruling that the statutes governing STR regulation

consistently treat terms like “house or dwelling unit” to refer to structures, and not to the legal character of a property’s use. They also consistently refer to mobile homes as “dwelling units.” We therefore conclude that the phrase “house or dwelling unit” in the Short-Term Rental Statute’s definition of “short-term rental” includes individual mobile home units and does not refer to the entire mobile home park…

We conclude that “property,” just like “short-term rental,” refers to individual mobile homes, not entire parcels…

At bottom, under the Short-Term Rental Statute, the city may not prohibit mobile homes from being used as short-term rentals…Because the city’s position that “[a]ny homes in a mobile home park are not permitted to be used as [short-term rentals]” conflicts with the Short-Term Rental Statute, the city’s position is preempted. The superior court erred by dismissing Oak Creek’s complaint.

Following the appeals court’s decision, the city council elected earlier this year to appeal the appeal to the Supreme Court, which denied the city’s petition for review on June 26 and kicked the case back to the appeals court and superior court for the judgment to be finalized. The city’s costs to pursue the case in the Court of Appeals were $382.34 in costs and $26,896.50 in fees.

Yavapai County Superior Court Judge Linda Wallace subsequently issued the final judgment in the case on August 4, ruling that

The court declares that A.R.S. § 9-500.39 pre-empts defendant city of Sedona from prohibiting or restricting the use of mobile homes in mobile home parks as short-term rentals except as provided in that section; and

The court further declares that the city may not prohibit plaintiff Oak Creek Hospitality LLC from using its property for short-term rentals on the basis that its property contains mobile homes in a mobile home park…

The city shall pay Oak Creek its costs reasonably incurred in this action, in the amount of $419.22; and the city shall also pay Oak Creek its attorney’s fees reasonably incurred in this action, in the amount of $17,882.00.

One fully realizes that all these state capitalists from New York and California who want the government to own everything are trying desperately to turn Sedona into a little bubble of what they left behind, but they really should have checked before coming to a state where property rights are still somewhat respected.

We should also bear in mind that the city just spent another $45,580.06, exclusive of staff time and costs at the county court stage, trying to diminish the rights of everyone who owns property in this town.

The city’s legal troubles are continuing with the inclusion of the city of Sedona in Sedona resident Amie Kollat’s suit against the city of Cottonwood and Yavapai County, filed in Yavapai County Superior Court on July 29, for negligence, interference with human remains, and infliction of emotional distress.

Kollat’s son Christian died in Cottonwood on April 16, 2025, and Kollat’s suit alleges that the Cottonwood police department mishandled the situation by falsely characterizing her son as a substance user or mental health case; issuing a report on the death containing multiple statements contradicted by the video from officers’ body-worn cameras; allowing other individuals present at the scene of the death to alter the surroundings and have contact with the corpse; and failure to maintain secure custody of the body. Kollat’s suit implies both the involvement of other individuals in her son’s accidental death and tampering with his corpse on the night following his death.

Sedona is involved because an SPD officer named R. Ramirez performed the death notification and alleged to Kollat that her son’s death had resulted from a drug overdose while having no evidence of an overdose apart from Cottonwood officers’ speculation. “Cottonwood’s communication and Sedona’s delivery converted an unverified investigative narrative into an official account at the moment of notification.”

Buckle in, Sedona. This one looks like it could take a couple of years to run its course. And no city attorney in the house.

That gang calling themselves the Sedona city council set the stage for their planned increase of sewer fees in 2027 by authorizing a sewer rate study during their Tuesday night meeting. Comrade Holland of wastewater argued that the last rate adjustment had not taken into account residential rates and that those needed to be updated in light of staff’s “more robust and complete” plans for future capital projects on which they can spend the public’s money. It will cost the residents of Sedona $71,520 to have an out-of-town consultant do the study, due by next February, and then tell them exactly how much more they should be paying for what is properly a non-city function.

Holland informed council, in a typically roundabout and evasive way, that city staff plan to evaluate “both financial data and wastewater characteristics in order to develop a comprehensive rate,” which actually means that they’re going to look for justifications to increase the rates by an especially large sum based upon the perceived affluence of many residents. The increase will be such a small sum as a proportion of the average income, staff will argue. It really won’t affect anyone’s budget. That’s the same argument finance mismanager Comrade Whitehorn made when she was trying to pretend that development fees were an insignificant part of the cost of new construction.

Let us not forget that this is the same council that has already expressed interest in attempting to count the number of occupants in a building by meticulously monitoring sewage flow—have they been talking to the CIA or a thriller writer?—and in charging short-term rentals higher rates if possible. Indeed, Comrade Pfaff reopened the door to that obsession on council’s part when he inquired, “Can we legally have rates that put more heavily on commercial than residential?” Lawyers asking questions about their own profession must be one of the most performative things it’s possible to do.

“It depends,” Comrade Coady replied, answering the question in interpretive dance. “The rates have to be just and reasonable…that’s the only criteria for this rate study, rate increase.” She added that a situation in which one group was subsidizing another would not be considered just and reasonable: “There is a case on that.” She did not address the fact that a rate increase purposefully computed at an artificially high level would disproportionately affect working families in town. Isn’t that the sort of systemic inequity that the Democratic Party members on council always pretend is a major concern for them?

Holland added that staff plan to create another citizen work group to attempt to whitewash the rate increase, which would consist of “a variety of businesses and community members” whom staff plan to recruit not through a public application but simply by “reaching out to community members they’re aware of” and “specific types of businesses.” City mismanager Comrade Spickard very obligingly informed the public that Comrade Hall, nee Moorcroft, typically selects the work group members and suggested that the council provide staff with feedback as to whom they would like to have on the group.

The council then moved on to replying to Fann Contracting’s lawsuit against the city for breach of contract by unanimously awarding McCarthy Building Companies, the primary contractor on the garage boondoggle, an additional $1,194,559 of public funds as supposed compensation for costs McCarthy had incurred as a result of Fann’s alleged “overexcavation” of the garage site. Staff claimed for council’s benefit that they had successfully negotiated McCarthy’s claim downward by more than $749,000.

After yours truly reminded council of the public’s suspicion surrounding the way in which the garage contract had been awarded without a bid, Comrade Ploog attempted to make a public argument, abetted by comrades Dickey and Christiansen, that the contracting process for the construction manager at risk contract had been controlled by state law outside the city’s purview until Pfaff upset the apple cart.

“Is there a non-CMAR process we could have gone through?” Pfaff demanded.

“There is,” Dickey admitted, and then proceeded to describe a couple such processes, including putting the garage out to bid like any other project. Spickard hurriedly pointed out that the decision to use the CMAR process in place of a bidding process had been staff’s, not council’s, decision. And there are your two real problems right there. Not confusion about the details of what a CMAR contract is or which law controls it. The problems are, number one, that staff made the decision instead of council, and number two, that any decision to forgo a public bidding process could or would ever be made by either staff or council. Dickey’s ludicrous attempt to salvage the situation involved claiming that bringing the contractor into the design process through the CMAR contract had allowed staff to “value-engineer” the garage to reduce costs. Excuse me? Staff admitted that they purposefully designed the garage to cost $8 million more than it needed to, the cost estimate for the project has more than doubled since it was first proposed, and it’s already several million dollars over the most recent budget with no opening date in sight. Where exactly is the value engineering?

As far as the supposed overexcavation of the site, anyone with half a brain and a knowledge of how the city of Sedona works can readily guess the answer that Fann’s lawyers are going to come back with in a few weeks: The city’s plans were wrong—again.

Perhaps if city staff hadn’t been so eager to reduce McCarthy’s workload and increase its profit margin by transferring some of its contracted work to Fann—at an additional cost to the public of $3.77 million, which was presumably the addition to its profits that McCarthy pocketed—this whole set of legal proceedings would never have happened. Apparently this is another method that staff use to pad contracts: not only change orders to increase a contract’s value, but also reductions in the scope of work, which effectively increases the contractor’s profit without any ostensible additional payment. Creative, but very expensive for the taxpayer in the long run, as we’re seeing.

La Williamson reemerged on Tuesday as she pitched the council on the idea of building a shade tree program for the sidewalks the size of airport runways. “A reforestation of Sedona is something really worth doing,” Williamson argued. One had not previously realized that she was so interested in ensuring that the city of Sedona burns to the ground and does so more quickly than might otherwise happen. Sedona is already massively overforested and needs a tree culling program, and she wants to add more trees? The argument seems especially schizophrenic when placed in context with her own and the council’s paranoia about wildfires, but this is what happens when people who have lived in New York City all their lives and have no idea how a rural ecology functions move to the country and think they can make decisions based on their aesthetic emotions rather than on rational land use principles.

“Sedona’s hot, it’s only gonna get hotter,” Williamson added in a whine, dismissing the fact that the optimal temperature for human cognitive function is between 77 and 102 degrees and that Sedona is therefore an ideal climate for humans at most times of the year, which is hardly a condition that warrants complaint or remedy.

Williamson then went on to establish herself as a fan of heavy traffic as well as a self-interested grifter when she claimed that Dry Creek Road is safer now that the speed bumps create traffic backups that create more traffic backups. “It’s really a joy…a job well done that certainly benefited everybody in my community,” Williamson gushed, oblivious to the fact that making cars go slower doesn’t solve traffic problems. Safety isn’t the point. These cars are being driven by humans, not animals, and humans have objectives to meet. Get rid of all the speed bumps and raise all the speed limits by 10 mph and that should help the traffic situation in Sedona quite a bit. Is it mere coincidence that complaints about traffic in Sedona have increased at the same time that the number of speed bumps and cops on the streets has increased, or is there a causal link?

Comrade Spickard announced during the session that Comrade General Foley will be bringing the Verde Valley’s Spetsnaz team to Uptown on August 24 so they can set off flash-bangs in the old bank building that will be demolished to make room for SFD’s new corporate welfare project.

A line from Msgr. Arthur Holquin’s column this week, commenting on the grave risks associated with a lack of cognitive empathy, strikes a particular nerve for Sedona especially:

We are producing what Pope Francis, in his own blunt idiom, once called “little monsters”: men technically correct and pastorally lethal, capable of doing enormous damage to souls precisely because they cannot imagine the souls they are damaging.

They cannot imagine the souls they are damaging. Our city council in one simple sentence: a group of individuals who have no experience or empathy to connect themselves to the day-to-day reality of the people who make this town function, cannot imagine what they are doing. They’ve not slept in their cars or been down to their last five dollars. They have no basis of experience to form a foundation for empathy, nor do they have sufficient creativity or vision or imagination to supply the absence of that experience, and intriguingly, lack of imagination is biologically associated with lack of empathy due to the interaction of both behaviors with the monoamine neurotransmitter system.

They simply cannot imagine what it means to be a real person.

By now you’ve all heard, thanks to the ambiguous and vague press release in the Snooze, that Judy Poe has departed as director of Community Library Sedona.

What you may not ever have heard is that the biggest accomplishment of Poe’s tenure at the library, literally, was gutting the collection, discarding 15,000 books and stripping the library’s holdings down from 80,000 to 65,000 volumes as part of her effort to make the library less of a library and more of a generic event space.

This is why some of us in this town want to build better libraries of our own—except that we can’t do so thanks to comrades Allender, Meyer, and the obstructions the city of Sedona places in the way of construction by anyone who isn’t a dumb millionaire.

Speaking of libraries and their function…

This week’s pseudoscience shoutout goes out to Olivia Maillet, the Verde Independent, and Kudos for publishing in the last-named comic book a promotional press release for a fraudulent Sedona business, Enchanting Earth—a crystal store, of course—that contained no fewer than twelve false statements. The press release, attributed under a byline to Maillet, began with some puffery about the shop owner’s rocks being charged with nonexistent “vortex energy”—let us not forget that the supposed vortexes were invented no earlier than 1976 as part of the new age movement’s convoluted appropriation of both diluted science fiction (thank you, L. Ron Hubbard and Dianetics) and American Indian spirituality. The remaining eleven lies dealt with the supposed properties of certain crystals to cause emotional changes in humans, in spite of the fact that, as explained by Christopher French of the University of London, who did the classic study on this pseudoscientific belief, “There is no evidence that crystal healing works over and above a placebo effect.”

In perhaps the most surreal and laughable moment of the advertorial, the store’s owner, Jaime Inglett, made the ridiculous claim that petalite was “great for stress relief” because “those have lithium.” There aren’t enough exclamation points in the typecase right now to give that remark the emphasis it deserves. Is she so hysterically ignorant that she believes the lithium will somehow transfer itself from the crystal to the person in a significant enough quantity to affect their behavior—or does she somehow believe that the “properties” of the lithium, absent any of the lithium itself, will be transferred to the person without any physical transference of a substance taking place? In other words, sheer sympathetic magic. Such claims are no less absurd and discreditable than the Catholic Church’s nonsense about third-class relics—and the Verde Independent is giving this garbage the time of day as if it were factually correct, completely abdicating its responsibility to do fact-checking and to take a critical, scientific approach to extraordinary claims. If there were claims going around the Verde Valley that a local virgin had begun displaying the stigmata, those allegations would be treated with the expected degree of skepticism in print, but apparently crystal therapy, which is well-known to be baseless, fraudulent, and scientifically invalid, gets a pass.

Do you people not realize that you are creating primary source documents? These lies can be cited in a misleading footnote now.

Importantly, there’s a legal disclaimer included in the promotional bull in Kudos, in which Inglett says, taking refuge in vagueness, “Sometimes people use their intuition and feel like a different-colored stone can achieve this for them, too.” When you can change a situation simply by using your mind, that’s how you know it existed only in your mind. That’s why things like governments and social forms are actually so susceptible to change. The Haudenosaunee, for instance, changed their customs fairly quickly when they realized those customs were about to drive them extinct. Of course, to be able to make such a choice, you first have to be able to think rationally and to realize that your emotions, particularly your fear and disgust reactions, are totally irrelevant to your decision-making. And if you can think rationally and can control your emotions, making decisions based on reason, you don’t need a crystal or any other material crutch to act as your prompt for changing your behavior.

Maybe if we had a library that still contained books and an education system in place of a state indoctrination system pumping out scientific ignorance, Sedonans wouldn’t be so clueless and such easy prey for con artists, although many of them make such willing prey. “Which is why it was eventually decided to cut through the whole tangled problem and breed an animal that actually wanted to be eaten and was capable of saying so clearly and distinctly. And here I am.”

Oh, and you’ll notice, Olivia, that there were two copy errors in that quote as printed that I’ve now corrected.

In the funniest and most ironic headline of the week, the Catholic Herald reports “Cardinal Marx confirmed as head of Vatican’s Council for the Economy.” It had to happen sometime.

This week’s Flock updates include cops in Goodyear, Apache Junction, Chandler, and Surprise all being placed on leave or quitting after they were discovered to have used their departments’ spycams for personal use—because, of course, no one ever predicted this was going to happen. Flock’s assurances that officers wouldn’t have unauthorized access were supposed to be enough, right? The cops are trustworthy and above reproach, right? (It may interest readers to know that 77 percent of cops are willing to commit perjury.) At least Chandler and Surprise got the message, albeit far too late, and are now pulling their spycams entirely. Poor Flock. They never got the chance to turn Ubers and Lyfts into roaming surveillance vehicles, either.

How much longer are Cottonwood and Coconino and Yavapai counties going to be allowed to hang onto this Leninist technology that the rest of Arizona is ditching? That’s why a bunch of us moved to the rural West in the first place: to be away from this totalitarian crap that will inevitably fail at huge social and economic cost.

Last week we once again considered the further decline of standards in education in Western society, and in that context it is appropriate to examine the difference between what engineers used to be able to do and what they are capable of doing today. As the protagonist of A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court boasts of his early education in New England industry,

My father was a blacksmith, my uncle was a horse doctor, and I was both, along at first. Then I went over to the great arms factory and learned my real trade; learned all there was to it; learned to make everything: guns, revolvers, cannon, boilers, engines, all sorts of labor-saving machinery. Why, I could make anything a body wanted—anything in the world, it didn’t make any difference what; and if there wasn’t any quick new-fangled way to make a thing, I could invent one—and do it as easy as rolling off a log.

Twain’s story has Hank Morgan precipitating a second industrial revolution (replacement of human and animal power in industry by inorganic machine power) at an absurdly fast pace, but the point was made: the engineer was expected to be a generalist who could shape metal, mostly, into whatever shape he desired. It was made again in a meticulously-written 1929 novel by Hawthorne Daniel, Bare Hands, in which a small group of wrecked castaways on an Aleutian island tackle the problem of how to get off the island, which presents them with very meagre resources and specific constraints. Among their available resources, however, is a vein of iron ore, and one of the party, who is an engineer, is able not only to oversee but to carry out the process of smelting the ore, building crude tools from the resulting metal, and then building progressively more complex tools until the party are able to construct a simple steam-powered boat to carry them to safety. All because one engineer knows the principles involved and carries them around in his head and can explain them to others.

Books such as these remind us that members of technical professions were formerly trained to and able to hold in their minds all the knowledge needed to perform the main tasks in their profession from the ground up, from fundamental steps to complex steps, which incidentally allowed them to reconstruct much of their profession from scratch or improvise it if necessary. They were trained to make their tools as well as to use them. Frank Lloyd Wright’s apprentices built what they designed with their own hands. More importantly, engineers—and other trades, and scholars—learned general principles out of which they could construct specifics to order, not sets of specifics only applicable in particular situations. Such broad abilities have increasingly disappeared as the twofold consequence of the collapse of an education system that trained generalists rather than specialists and of the growth of complexity within twenty-first century technical professions, which has made the amount of information that must be retained for mastery excessive and the nature of many tasks esoteric.

When I was a teenager, I shadowed a chip designer at a local semiconductor factory. He couldn’t make the calculations required from his projects from memory. He didn’t know the equations or the constants. He had to look them up in a textbook whenever he needed them. On the one hand, that intellectual approach saves space. On the other hand, if you don’t have the textbook handy and you need the information, you’re screwed.

We cannot forget that culture is information contained in human brains and the transmission of that information from one generation of humans to the next. If the information disappears from human brains, if it is not being transmitted reliably, culture and civilization cease to exist, regardless of whether the information is still printed in books. As the intellectual transmission of first principles necessary to understand the information contained in the books falters, the books themselves will become less useful. Then it’s curtains for the current phase of cultural development.