Two Sides, One Failure
An agenda item to create a Pahrump police force turned into a 25+ minute shouting match. Nobody in the room offered a fix for the real problem.
Pahrump does not have a police department. The Nye County Sheriff's Office handles all law enforcement in town, and it has for as long as the town has existed.
At the September 15, 2026 meeting of the Nye County Board of County Commissioners, Commissioner Ian Bayne asked the board to change that.
He brought two items:
- Agenda Item 12: a public hearing on Town of Pahrump Bill No. 2026-03, which would add Chapter 26 to town code and create the Pahrump Police Department.
- Agenda Item 14: "Discussion and debate over FUNDING for Pahrump Police Department."
- Agenda Item 13: Flock acception
What came next was not a debate over public safety. It was a fight between two elected men, BOCC and the people of Pahrump were stuck listening to it. When it was over, the bill died. Not one commissioner would even second it.
What Bayne wanted to build
Bayne's plan is small. His memo to the board, filed with Item 12, lays it out.
The new department would have three part-time officers. All three are retired Nye County Sheriff's lieutenants:
Name | Proposed job | 2025 county pay as lieutenant |
|---|---|---|
Chief | $136,080 base, $236,105 with benefits | |
Officer-lieutenant | $136,065 base, $237,283 with benefits | |
Officer-lieutenant | $122,780 base, $216,732 with benefits |
All three were still on the county payroll in 2025. The sheriff's office lost three lieutenants to retirement while it was already short on people.
Bayne's plan would bring them back to police the same town, working for a different boss.
They would patrol "all parks" and "shopping areas." The memo says the officers "will not be distracted or called away by other things" and can stop crime "before it happens."
The proposed uniform is a cowboy hat, jeans and a bulletproof vest memo calls it "consistent with our western culture."
The memo also promises a homeless outreach effort called the Lifeline Program. Here is the full description as filed: "which will offer transportation and." The sentence stops there. The board was asked to consider a program whose description is not finished.
The first year would be paid with a proposed federal grant (that has yet to be approved) called LATCF. After that, the memo says, the money would "likely" come from the Town of Pahrump.
NCLEA did not recommend creating a police and 73% voted against it.
“After reviewing the proposal and discussing its potential impact on law enforcement services in Nye County, the NCLEA Board voted to oppose the creation of the Pahrump Police Department as currently proposed.”
The numbers do not match each other
Bayne's memo says the police force costs about $80,000 a year, plus about $25,000 to get started. That is about $105,000.
His own funding request, Item 14, asks for $153,200:
Line | Amount |
|---|---|
Salaries and wages | $102,000 |
Benefits | $20,500 |
Services and supplies | $30,700 |
Total | $153,200 |
That is almost 50 percent more than the memo says.
The pay does not line up either. The memo says the retired officers are capped and "cannot be paid more than approximately $28,000 per year." The supply sheet lists $30,000 for the chief and $30,000 for each officer. Three salaries at $30,000 is $90,000. The request says $102,000.
Several costs on the sheet have no number at all. Background checks, physicals, yearly training and dash cameras are all marked "TBD." The sheet also lists a town-owned Ram 3500 truck, a truck wrap, radios, body cameras and phones.
The ordinance itself says the new department cannot take away any of the sheriff's power. Section 26-8 says the board must approve a written agreement with the sheriff on who does what. No such agreement was in the packet.
Why Pahrump does not need this
The memo makes one point that works against it. It says, "The total cost of Pahrump Police is less than the cost of a single deputy."
That is the problem. Pahrump would pay for less than one deputy's worth of policing and get three part-time officers who only watch parks and stores. Every other call in town, from a break-in to a crash to a domestic fight, still goes to the sheriff.
A second police agency also means a second chain of command, a second policy manual, a second records system and a second set of lawsuits when something goes wrong.
Section 26-6 of the ordinance lists twelve policy areas the new chief must write, including use of force, car chases and internal affairs. Three part-timers would have to build all of it.
Now compare the price to what the sheriff needs. A new Nye County deputy starts at about $45,281. With Nevada's police pension rate at 58.75 percent, plus health insurance and taxes, each new deputy costs the county close to $76,000. Bayne's $153,200 is about what it would cost to put two full-time deputies on the street.
The memo says town money is not supposed to pay for county deputies. That may be the rule. It does not change the math. Pahrump has one public safety problem, and this plan does not touch it.
What happened in the room
Bayne opened with a long speech about protecting the town's parks and keeping them clean. Much of it was about homeless people, a group he has gone after many times before. It sounded less like a plan and more like a campaign speech with Bayne as the hero.
He then read Facebook comments praising himself out loud. Some backed his idea. Others attacked Sheriff Joe McGill.
Commissioner John Koenig and Commission Chair Ron Boskovich appeared to fall asleep. Commissioner Debra Strickland kept her eyes on her papers and tried to look busy.
McGill did not come to the meeting. He called in by phone. He did not stick to the plan in front of the board. He went after Bayne himself, and he kept going. The back-and-forth rants ran 25+ minutes.
There is an odd twist here. Adam Tippetts, one of Bayne's three picks, is the same lieutenant who publicly defended McGill in 2022. When a video of McGill making an arrest was posted online, Tippetts called the post "slanderous." He was also one of four sheriff's supervisors who sued the last sheriff after backing McGill. Now he is on the other side of McGill's anger.
When it came time to act, Strickland moved to vote the bill down.
Nobody seconded her. Bayne obviously moved to pass his own bill.
Nobody seconded him either. With no second on any motion, the bill died.
After 25+ min of speeches and shouting, the board did not even take a vote.
What the sheriff did not say
McGill had a stage and he used it against Bayne.
He did not explain why his department is seven deputies short of where it should be. He did not explain why three more deputies are out for now while investigations play out. He did not explain the overtime. He did not offer solutions.
Those investigations are not a small thing. In August, two detention deputies were charged in the death of Stevie Miller inside the county jail. The sheriff's office ran both the criminal and internal investigations itself.
Overtime is where this story really lives. When a shift has no one to fill it, someone already on the job works it at time and a half. County filings show the sheriff's Pahrump salary bill went up about 15 percent in one year while the number of people it covered went down about 26 percent. (The county has never explained how it counts those people, so the exact figures need a check. The direction is clear.)
The advertised starting pay is about $45,000. The median patrol deputy actually took home $81,751 in 2025, 1.8 times that. Much of the difference is overtime.
Paying overtime to cover empty jobs does not save money. It costs more. And tired deputies working 60-hour weeks start looking for other jobs. When they leave, the overtime gets worse.
That problem is years old. In July 2023, McGill told the county he had about 30 open jobs and could not hire fast enough. In May 2026, his office asked for $500,000 for an armored BearCat truck. Two weeks later the county said it was $11 million short. It ended the year with $170,702 in its main fund.
Two sides, same failure
Bayne wanted to add a small, costly new layer on top of a department that cannot fill its own shifts. McGill wants to fight Bayne instead of explaining those shifts. Neither man brought a plan to fix the base problem.
The base problem is simple. The sheriff cannot hire and keep enough deputies. Everything else, from the overtime to the empty shifts to this police proposal, grows out of that.
What would actually help
None of these ideas are new. None of them came up on September 15.
1. Close the pay gap. Las Vegas Metro starts officers at about $59,321, around $14,000 more than Nye. Metro is an hour away. The county is already paying much of that gap in overtime. It could pay it as salary and keep people. The sheriff's union contracts are where that change would be written.
2. Hire veterans on purpose. Pahrump has about 6,271 veterans. Many already have the training and discipline the job needs. There is no sign of a program aimed at them.
3. Use retirees inside the sheriff's office. Bayne found three retired lieutenants willing to work part-time. The sheriff could hire retirees like them as part-time or reserve deputies to cover shifts, under one command, with one policy manual.
4. Move desk and transport work to civilians. Not every task needs a sworn deputy. Civilian staff can handle reports, court transports and records. That frees deputies for patrol, including parks.
5. Finish investigations fast, and not in-house. Three deputies sitting out while cases drag on is three more holes in the schedule. Clear deadlines and outside agencies get people cleared or gone sooner, and the public can trust the result.
6. Show the numbers every month. The public should see open jobs, overtime hours, overtime dollars and how many deputies are out. Right now nobody can check if things are getting better or worse.
7. Spend what is already there. The sheriff's public safety sales tax fund held about $2.46 million at the end of March 2026. It is likely limited by law in how it can be spent. The board and sheriff should say, in public, what it can pay for and why it is sitting still.
Pahrump does not need a new police force in cowboy hats. It needs a sheriff's office with enough deputies to answer the phone. That fix is harder than a speech.
Who to call
- Commissioner Ian Bayne, (775) 751-7075
- Sheriff Joe McGill, (775) 751-7000
- All five commissioners and every county officer: Who's who in Nye County
Documents and records behind this story
The meeting: September 15, 2026 BOCC agenda, Item 12 (Town of Pahrump Bill No. 2026-03, with Commissioner Bayne's formation memo) and Item 14 (funding request and supply sheet) · Nye's Lies meeting tracker · Nye's Lies bill tracker · Nye County meeting video archive · Nye County Meeting Center
Pay: Nye County salaries on Nye's Lies · Klenczar, 2025 · Williams, 2025 · Tippetts, 2025 · Nevada PERS rate memo, July 2025
Budget: Nye County public safety sales tax reports · Pahrump Valley Times, May 29, 2026, budget cuts · Pahrump Valley Times, July 18, 2023, staffing and pay · Treasury, LATCF program
Background: Pahrump Valley Times, 2022 bodycam dispute · Pahrump Valley Times, four supervisors' lawsuit · U.S. Census Bureau, Pahrump
More from Nye's Lies: What's Eating The Sheriff's Budget · The Sheriff Wouldn't Name The Deputies · It's A Pattern: A Brief History Of The Sheriff's Department · The Sheriff's three union contracts
Meeting events are from our reporter's direct observation of the September 15 meeting. Pay figures are 2025 Nye County payroll records published by Transparent Nevada. The two deputies charged in August have not been convicted.
