Audio By Carbonatix
In the New Age capital of Sedona, the great outdoors is a precious commodity. Red cliffs and lush greenery make the land one of the state’s most beautiful spots for tourists and day-tripping city folk. For others the attraction goes deeper. Sedona is world famous as a metaphysical “hot spot,” a place where the ground holds special properties, a place where rocks are fountains of magical energy. So, more than most other towns, Sedona’s trees and rocks and dirt have worth. For example, the current worth of Sedona’s trees is $1,000 each. This figure was arrived at last month by the Sedona City Council when it drafted an emergency tree-preservation ordinance. The council, working in a frenzy of environmentalism sparked by the construction of a new Safeway store and the related relocation of a small mountain of red dirt, made it illegal to cut down trees.
The law came too late to save the Shelby Road trees, but they did not die in vain. This is their story.
It all started long before the morning of May 20 when Larry Cowan woke to the sound of chain saws outside his bedroom window. It started back when ground was broken for a new shopping center out on 89A, one of Sedona’s major thoroughfares and arguably one of the prettiest highways in the country. A big Safeway store will be the major tenant of the center once it’s done, and that won’t be for a while because 200,000 cubic yards of dirt and rocks have to be moved from the site before construction can start. (That a large amount of scenic trees, rocks and red dirt has to be removed before a Safeway store can be built in Sedona is a story in itself. There are members of the Sedona citizenry who look upon enterprises such as grocery stores, gas stations and chain restaurants as unholy intrusions on the natural splendor of their space. Still, progress marches on. A new Bashas’ store is now in the works for Sedona, too.)
Those 200,000 cubic yards of Sedona have to go somewhere. Some time ago, Park West, a Phoenix-based shopping-center developer, contracted with C&F Equipment Company, also of Phoenix, to move the dirt. Also some time ago, C&F applied for and received all the required paperwork to move the dirt onto a plot the company already had taken steps to purchase.
Cut to Shelby Road, about a half mile from the Safeway site. On Saturday, May 20, Sedona resident Larry Cowan woke to the sound of chain saws. A team of C&F workers was cutting down mature juniper trees on a lot adjacent to his home. “There were like ten guys over there, and four or five trucks,” Cowan says. “I never counted them, but with all the smoke and noise . . . I was appalled.” After talking with the workers, Cowan discovered that they intended to cut down nine full acres of trees and that the parcel of land next door to his house was going to be the future home of 200,000 cubic acres of fill dirt. He then returned home. Over at June Cornelison’s house, the phone rang. Cornelison, one of Cowan’s neighbors and Sedona’s vice mayor, was already awake, because she had heard the chain saws, too.
Within an hour Sedona city officials had cooked up a stop-work order and delivered it to the Shelby Road site, but not before the crew cut down about twenty trees. C&F president Duke Francis (a part-time Sedona resident, according to his lawyer) then agreed to meet with all concerned parties at 11 a.m. the following Wednesday, at which time there would be a discussion of the dirt-fill project. On Monday, May 22, Sedona city officials begin drafting their emergency tree-preservation law in hopes of having it ready to discuss at the meeting with Francis. Enter Michael Curtis.
“The president of C&F sought the proper regulatory approval to move fill dirt from a site . . . to a piece of property that was a distance away,” recaps Curtis, Duke Francis’ Phoenix-based attorney. “Mr. Francis complied with all the rules and regulations. [When the actual work commenced] the residents adjacent to the property . . . suddenly aroused themselves and others and said to the city, `You can’t do that.’
“Within a matter of 48 hours, Mr. Francis was backed into a corner and told that if you just wait, things could be worked out. He already had all the permits. What he was supposed to wait for was an emergency meeting of the city council, acting under the regulatory powers granted to them by the state, that was probably going to pass an ordinance, which nobody had been actively promoting and there had been no lengthy public hearings on, but which was going to effectively shut him down, disrupt his contract, which was to remove the dirt, and delay him and possibly bankrupt him. “He found himself the cause
celeçbre.”
At 6:30 Wednesday morning, mere hours before the meeting that was to solve this aesthetic, emotional and political nightmare, June Cornelison was awakened again, this time by the sound of bulldozers. “I knew immediately what they were doing,” Cornelison says. “They were not going to wait.”
After apparently conferring with his attorney (“I can’t comment on that,” Curtis says), Francis had decided to continue with the crude forestry. “All of a sudden the entire community is finally galvanized into doing something about their environment, but they were going to do it over the dead body of Mr. Francis,” Curtis says. “This was a firestorm. All of a sudden, people realized. And they were of no mind at that point to be told that this is a lawful process that can continue.”
According to observers, more than 100 trees were bladed from the plot. Curtis describes the general Shelby Road area as “a light-industrial, commercial area.” Others would disagree. The land is zoned for homes. “The nature of the growth that was on it was not the dense tall timber,” Curtis says. “It was not wooded forestland. It was the type of moderate-sized green brush that is frequently seen in the lower Sedona area. We’re not talking about redwood trees and tall pines or forestland.”
The mood of the 11 a.m. meeting called to save the trees was “hot, real hot,” Cowan says. “If there had been any trees left, we’d have probably strung up some people.” Francis was not in attendance, though his lawyer was. Nobody got strung up. “Considering how emotional a lot of the people from the city were, they handled themselves pretty well,” Cornelison says.
At the city council’s regular meeting that night, the tree-preservation statute was approved unanimously. The new law made it illegal to cut down more than two trees–even on private property–without the city’s permission. The infraction is a Class 1 misdemeanor, punishable by a $1,000 fine or six months in jail or both. For the record, the new law defined “tree” as a growth taller than four feet or wider in diameter than four inches. Meanwhile, C&F’s fill operation was in full swing. On June 12, Duke Francis pleaded not guilty to a misdemeanor charge brought by Sedona for allegedly violating the city’s stop-work order. The city, desperate for a way to stop Francis on May 20, accused him of technical violations of his original dumping permit. That led to the misdemeanor charge. Some questions remain about the ownership of the Shelby Road plot. According to Cornelison, the title remains in the name of a third party. According to Curtis, “Mr. Francis has an irrevocable option to acquire that land and to deal with that land at this time as the owner.”
Cornelison and others say now that they believed C&F’s fill dirt was going to be used to level a large wash on the Shelby Road plot. “We did know that fill was going to be dumped there,” she admits. “If it was done in such a way to make the land usable, I don’t think anybody had a problem with that. I think that’s what the citizens thought was going to be done.”
Curtis, summing it up for C&F, says: “Tragically, Mr. Francis is personally distraught. We don’t want to come across at all as sour grapes. . . . We were bewildered. We had to be careful not to allow Mr. Francis and his company to become a victim of an enraged group–not an improperly enraged group, a properly enraged group.”
Predictably, the Safeway company has been a target of this citizen rage. There has been some talk around town of a boycott, and the company has received “about a dozen” angry phone calls from local residents, according to Debra Albery, public-affairs manager for Safeway in Arizona. “We understand why people in Sedona are upset,” she says, “and we can’t understand why they can get the impression that Safeway was in some way connected [to the Shelby Road fill site]. Safeway had no knowledge of any of the activities. We were not consulted.”
Says vice mayor Cornelison: “I would be lying if I said I didn’t care personally. You can see this bald hill from subdivisions two miles away. The foothills south, in different parts of the city that are elevated higher than others, they all have a view of this big bald hill. “Our economic base is, in fact, the view. That’s why people come here. Otherwise, it’s some other little town, a little dot on the map.”
The view from Larry Cowan’s house isn’t very scenic anymore, made up as it is of large earthmoving trucks. “Well, the discouraging part is we lost the trees to start with,” he says. “There are about six homes along this area that have basically lost value. We’ve depreciated our lots by–who knows–$20,000? In Sedona, half the value of your lot is the view. One day, we had a view. The next day we end up with a pile of red dirt.”
“If there had been any trees left, we’d have probably strung up some people.”
“You can see this bald hill from subdivisions two miles away.
