"The consistent finding is that the Uptown challenges relate to peak demand, circulation, employee parking and neighborhood spillover, not simply a lack of spaces."
Transit Administrator Amber Wagner said that to the Sedona City Council back in February, and it's worth sitting with, because the entire Uptown parking conversation since has treated the garage on Forest Road as the fix. It isn't. The garage is one piece of a five-year project that also includes meter rates, an employee parking plan, and a residential permit program for the streets that actually border it. Three of those pieces just moved. The fourth, the one that determines what happens on your own curb, is still waiting on the others to finish first.
If you live on Van Deren, Price, or Smith, here's where things actually stand.
Five Years, Three Price Tags
The garage's cost has been a moving number since before anyone poured concrete. In May 2024, the council approved construction at $23 million, or $25 million once the Forest Road land purchase was folded in. By January 2026, the city's own quarterly transportation update put the figure at $26.4 million, with the project about 70 percent complete and an opening targeted for June. By late August 2026, Deputy City Manager Andy Dickey told council the total project cost had reached approximately $28.25 million, and the opening had slipped again, from a spring break 2026 target, to June, to now December or January.
| Date | What the city said |
|---|---|
| May 2024 | Council approves construction at $23 million ($25 million including land) |
| January 2026 | Cost listed at $26.4 million; project 70% complete; opening targeted for June |
| August 2026 | Total project cost near $28.25 million; opening now pushed to December or January |
Some of that final jump has a straightforward explanation. Council approved a $3,741,285.50 contract with J. Banicki Construction on Aug. 25, and about $1.2 million of it funds a water main upgrade the project didn't originally plan for. Deputy City Manager Dickey told council the existing line feeding the garage's sprinkler system moves water faster than plumbing code allows, the kind of detail that sounds minor until it adds seven figures to a five-year-old budget. Council members weren't thrilled either way. Councilman Pete Furman has called for a formal performance audit once the building opens, calling it "a great test ground of what we can actually see and learn."
What 270 New Spaces Actually Replace
The garage is expected to add about 270 new public parking spaces to Uptown. That number gets repeated often, and it deserves a footnote.
Since 2023, the city has also removed spaces from the same public inventory. Lot 1 on Jordan Road, 70 spaces, was sold to the Sedona Fire District for its new station. Lot 8, 23 spaces across from the garage site, is being sold as well. On-street paid parking dropped by four more spaces in the same stretch. Add it up and the city has already given back 97 spaces since 2023, before the garage has parked a single car.
Subtract that from the garage's 270, and the real net gain looks closer to 170 spaces than 270. Still a genuine increase, just a smaller one than the headline number suggests, and worth knowing before you assume Uptown parking is about to double.
The Fee Schedule Your Street Doesn't Benefit From Yet
Council also set maximum parking rates on Aug. 25, the framework for a future where every public space in Uptown carries a fee. The garage and the Sacajawea Plaza surface lot will top out at $2.50 an hour, rising to $3.50 during peak season, March through May and September through November. On-street meters along State Route 89A and Jordan Road run higher: $4 an hour with a three-hour limit, or $5 in peak season. Fees apply from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m., with no parking allowed between midnight and 5 a.m.
None of it takes effect until the garage itself opens. City staff have said they intend to watch how Uptown behaves for at least six months after that before deciding what comes next, which means even the rates council already approved are, for now, still theoretical for anyone who lives here.
The Streets Still Waiting: Van Deren, Price, and Smith
This is the part that matters most if your address is one of the three. The Residential Permit Parking program, covering Van Deren, Price, and Smith roads between Schnebly Road on the north and Forest Road on the south, advanced on a 5-1 council vote on Aug. 25, with Councilwoman Kathy Kinsella opposed. Advanced is the operative word. It still needs final council approval, and even then it doesn't switch on automatically. It's built to activate only if one of six conditions is met:
- Emergency access or public safety is compromised
- Spillover parking from the garage lands on residential streets
- Resident feedback prompts it
- Parking use and occupancy data support it
- The Parking Work Group recommends it
- The council directs it
In other words, the tool exists, but nobody pulls the trigger until the garage opens and someone starts measuring what happens to your block afterward. The plan on the table would make permits free, with an anticipated range of two to four vehicles per household and a notification process for things like family gatherings. Enforcement would run through mobile license plate readers operated by the Sedona Police Department, which the city has publicly stated are not connected to any law-enforcement database and cannot be used for investigative or surveillance purposes, a clarification it felt necessary to issue after last year's separate controversy over Flock Safety cameras.
There's a related question that's been quietly parked even longer. The city's own transportation planning page lists Van Deren, Wilson, and Smith, not just the three streets in the current permit boundary, as candidates for conversion to one-way traffic, a change aimed at the narrow widths that currently force cars to back straight into traffic from driveways. That idea remains on hold until the garage is finished and its effects can be studied, with resident outreach promised before anything moves forward.
The Employee Parking Piece Got Sent Back
A companion proposal would have let Uptown employees carpool for free, pay $2 a day for a single-occupancy space, or buy a $25 monthly pass, drawing from a pool of about 205 potential spaces, 104 of them carved out of the city's existing public inventory. Council didn't adopt it. Members raised a gift clause concern, a reference to the state constitutional limit on giving away public resources without adequate return, and sent the plan back to the Parking Work Group to find a version that eases the cost on workers without running into that problem. It will likely resurface once the group's revised recommendation comes back to council.
This Week's Actual Chance to Shape It
There's a more immediate way to weigh in than waiting on any of the above. The city is running walking, biking, and transit tours this month to kick off the Uptown Community Focus Area Plan, the document that will eventually govern how the district's streets, sidewalks, and public spaces get redesigned. A version of this plan was drafted once before, presented to council in September 2021, then shelved when the city chose to rewrite the broader Sedona Community Plan first. That rewrite finished in 2024, and finishing the Uptown CFA is now listed as an action item in it.
The tours run this week and next: a biking tour Thursday, Sept. 17 at 8 a.m., a walking tour Saturday, Sept. 19 at 9 a.m., transit tours Wednesday, Sept. 23 at 10:30 a.m. and 1 p.m., and a second walking tour Thursday, Sept. 24 at 5:30 p.m. Each covers ground that includes View Walk, the Y intersection, Tlaquepaque Arts Village, Gallery Row, Hillside Shopping Center, Brewer Road, and the Arabella Hotel. Groups are capped at 10 to 12 people, so if you have opinions about how your own street should look once the garage dust settles, this is the forum built for exactly that, and it doesn't require waiting on a trigger condition to be met.
What This Actually Adds Up To
The garage now has a real date. The fee structure has real numbers. Everything that touches the residential side of Uptown, permit parking, one-way conversion, even the employee plan, is still contingent on watching what the garage does once it opens. If you live on one of these streets, the next few months are less about a finished project than about a monitoring period that hasn't started yet, and a planning process that's asking for your input right now, this week, while the plan is still being drawn.
Katrin Themlitz has spent more than twenty years working alongside these city processes, from water rights in the Verde Valley to zoning questions that only surface once you own property somewhere specific. If you're trying to understand how any of this touches a property you already own in Uptown, or one you're watching from a distance, Katrin Themlitz is glad to talk it through. Let's Connect.
