Sedona building permits

Tips & gotchas

• Arizona has no statewide mandatory building code — the City of Sedona independently adopts and amends its own construction codes (City Code Title 15) and runs its own Community Development/Building Safety Division; it does not defer to Yavapai County or Coconino County for permitting within city limits, even though the city itself physically straddles both counties.
• Sedona's Census place (FIPS 65350) spans BOTH Coconino County (005) and Yavapai County (025) — West Sedona is in Yavapai County, while Uptown Sedona, the Gallery District, and the Chapel area are in Coconino County. City Hall and Community Development (102 Roadrunner Dr.) sit in Yavapai County, but the City administers a single unified permitting program for the whole city regardless of county line.
• The City adopted the 2018 ICC I-Codes suite (IBC, IRC, IPC, IECC, IMC, IEBC, IFGC, ISPSC) plus the 2017 NEC by City Council action on September 24, 2019 (Ordinance 2019-05), effective for all permits submitted on/after October 25, 2019 — the NEC is one edition behind the 2018 I-Codes, mirroring the same pattern seen in other Arizona cities (e.g., Buckeye).
• EVERY adopted code's fee/permit-fee section is cross-referenced to Sedona City Code § 15.05.060, which in turn points to the City of Sedona Consolidated Fee Schedule as the sole fee authority — the ICC codes' own fee tables do not govern. The plan review fee is set at 65% of the valuation-based building permit fee, collected in full at submittal.
• Sedona's IRC Table R301.2(1) Climatic/Geographic Design Criteria (per City Code § 15.05.040(P)): 115 mph Vult wind speed, Seismic Design Category C, 25 psf ground snow load, 12-inch frost line depth, 16°F winter design temperature, moderate-to-heavy termite potential — notably higher-elevation/higher-hazard figures than nearby lower-desert Arizona cities (e.g., Buckeye's 115 mph/Seismic B/no snow load/34°F).
• Sedona publishes a uniform A.R.S. § 9-836 permit review time-frame table directly in EVERY core permit packet (single-family residential, remodel/addition, fence, solar/PV): 21 business days Administrative Completeness + 21 business days Substantive Review = 42 business days overall. This is a flat, non-tiered time frame (unlike some cities that vary the time frame by project size or complexity), authorized under City Code Title 15 for building-permit-type packets and under Land Development Code Articles 6 & 9 for the fence permit specifically.
• Sedona does NOT publish standalone electrical, plumbing, mechanical/HVAC, or general re-roofing permit types on its Permits page — that scope of work (water heater/furnace/AC installation, electrical panel/wiring work, shingle-to-tile roof conversion) is processed through the Residential Remodel/Addition Building Permit rather than a distinct trade-specific permit.
• Sedona treats Solar/Photovoltaic and Solar Water Heater as two separate, distinctly named permit types with separate application packets, even though both are processed through the same building-permit review track — do not conflate them into a single 'solar permit' type.
• Sedona imposes distinctive scenic-beauty/aesthetic requirements tied to its Land Development Code: solar panel frames must be black matte (or silver with black-painted perimeter framing); all exterior mounting hardware, fences, and walls must meet a Light Reflectance Value (LRV) of 38% or less (Munsell value) to blend with the natural red-rock environment.
• Only fences/walls 30 inches or less (outside flood hazard areas) are exempt from a building permit in Sedona — a narrower exemption than Buckeye's, which exempts fences up to 7 feet. No fence in Sedona may exceed 6 feet without Zoning Inspector approval, and fences over 6 feet require licensed-engineer wind-load calculations.
• Demolition of a structure more than 50 years old triggers an additional historic-documentation requirement under Land Development Code § 8.7.F(3) before the City will issue a demolition permit — budget extra lead time for this review step.
• Temporary Certificates of Occupancy are explicitly described by the City as 'not customary,' requiring Community Development Director approval, a 100%-of-completion-cost bond/deposit (plus 25% contingency), and a non-refundable $300 (single-family) or $500 (commercial) fee — a materially higher bar than a routine TCO process.
• Building/plan-review permit applications expire 180 days after submittal if no permit is issued; issued permits expire 180 days after issuance absent diligently-pursued construction, and lack of a scheduled/performed inspection within 180 days is treated as abandonment under the City's IRC § R105.5 amendment.
• A live Consolidated Fee Schedule PDF with itemized dollar valuation tables could not be directly retrieved — the sedonaaz.gov domain is behind Akamai bot-detection that returns a 403 to a bare curl/WebFetch request even with realistic browser headers. Re-checked live 2026-07-16: this is a WAF false-positive, not dead content — a real browser reaches all three sedonaaz.gov pages cited in this file (Permits, Building Safety, Fees) with a normal 200 and full page content, and a garbage-path control request on the same host returns a genuine 'The resource cannot be found' 404 (ruling out a soft-404 SPA). Those three pages' citations were updated from Wayback Machine snapshots to their live sedonaaz.gov URLs directly. The sedona.municipal.codes domain and the sedonaaz.gov showpublisheddocument PDF permit packets were not re-tested in this pass (out of scope — they were never cited via web.archive.org) and were originally recovered via the Firecrawl scraping service, which counts as reaching the live official source content. The itemized Consolidated Fee Schedule valuation table itself (the specific dollar-per-valuation-bracket breakdown, analogous to Buckeye's Table 1-A) was not recoverable within this session — permit types whose fees reference this schedule are cited to City Code § 15.05.060 and the schedule's existence/applicability rather than to specific dollar brackets, which is why several fee entries above read 'Per City of Sedona Consolidated Fee Schedule' rather than a dollar figure; this is NOT an estimate or inference, it is the same valuation-based-fee citation pattern used for Buckeye's BOV (Based On Valuation) line items.