Note: This article was updated May 21, 2025.

The Patagonia Town Council voted 5-0 to adopt a $4.3 million budget for Fiscal Year 2026 at a one-hour meeting on May 14 attended by eight members of the public in person and four more on Zoom. 

Outside of administration, the Town budget’s biggest spends are for law enforcement ($456,095), parks ($246,898) and the library ($283,990). A comparatively small sum of $70,008 has been allotted for the Town’s fire and emergency medical services coverage.

The recipient of the Town’s fire/EMS contract, traditionally Patagonia Volunteer Fire & Rescue [PVFR], has still not been determined. With rumors swirling that Sonoita-Elgin Fire District has already been told that they will not win the bid, Mayor Andy Wood reported to Council that “we have had a meeting with [PVFR Acting Fire Chief] Zay Hartigan from the Fire department, and offered him a proposal. We have not heard back from him yet.” 

Mayor Wood offered no further details about the meeting’s participants or the nature of the proposal, and there was no discussion. Nor was a date given for an official Council vote on the contract.

Over 30 minutes of the May 14 meeting were devoted to a resolution to dissolve the Patagonia Public Library Advisory Board, which has existed for decades, and immediately replace it with a new “Library Operational Advisory Council.” The Advisory Board has been led by the Library Director and made up of members of the community approved by the Town Council, whereas members of the proposed new Operational Advisory Council would be chosen by the Town Manager. 

Prior to the vote, former Library Director Abbie Zeltzer, who retired in 2019 after 25 years of service, urged the Council to keep the current Library Advisory Board structure, arguing that it was a part of a “bottom-up rather than top-down” system that, she said, had “worked prior to my employment and through 2020” to ensure that the Library provided services representative of the community that it serves.

Responding to Zeltzer, Mayor Wood seemed to suggest that the resolution was in response to a possible violation of Arizona’s open meeting law by the Library Advisory Board at the Board’s monthly meeting on April 15. (The Town’s notice for that meeting said the Advisory Board would “hold an executive session to discuss library policy items.” That meeting followed the abrupt resignation of Library Director Shawnie Kennedy on March 24 after a little more than two months on the job.) 

Asked by Mayor Wood if the Board during Zeltzer’s tenure had ever had issues in following Arizona’s open meeting law, Zeltzer said no. 

“We had a solid board,” Zelzter said. “We may have had one person leave that board. When a new person came in, they definitely would have read the bylaws and know the procedures that the board needed to follow, because people that had been there before shared that with them, whereas now…? I have no clue. I think that’s one of the major issues right now, is there has been NO continuity. They’re all new Library Board people. [Library] staff is constantly changing. There have been more people appointed, or hired—I don’t know what the procedure is now—in [the last four years] then there were in [the previous] 25 years. Something is amiss.”

A second member of the public, Carolyn Shafer, argued in favor of the resolution, saying that the Library should be treated like any other Town department: that is, any advisory council affiliated with the Library should report to the Town Manager, and should not include any Town employees. 

“The Library is a town department, just like every department in this town,” Shafer said. “You have the people here in the office, the people running the garbage stuff, and everything else. All those departments report to the Town Manager. This is in my mind an administrative issue for the Town, [about] clearly keeping departments that have employees functioning all in the same way.”

Mayor Wood and the other four Council members voiced general agreement with this argument, and the resolution passed 5-0.

The Council’s next regular meeting is scheduled for Wednesday, May 28 at 6pm, and will include a public hearing on a proposal from T-Mobile (see the Town’s official public notice below). The full agenda for the meeting should be available on Monday, May 26.