2 min read

Hey Ian, Why the Gmail?

Four of Nye County's five commissioners do county business on county email. Commissioner Ian Bayne is listed at a Gmail address, the only personal account in the county's entire published directory. One question, and a standing offer to print the answer.

Hey Ian.

Quick question, asked in public because the answer belongs in public.

Nye County's own directory lists your official contact as commissionerbayne@gmail.com. Your four colleagues on the Board of County Commissioners all use county addresses: bjjabbour@nyecountynv.gov, jkoenig@nyecountynv.gov, reboskovich@nyecountynv.gov, dlstrickland@nyecountynv.gov.

We read the whole directory, all 526 entries. A handful of addresses are not @nyecountynv.gov, and every one of them belongs to another government: the Town of Pahrump, the Town of Round Mountain, state health, state veterans services. Yours is the only personal account in it.

So: why the Gmail?

We ask because it matters, not because we care where you read your mail. County business is public record under Nevada law, and the Nevada Supreme Court settled the private-inbox question in 2018. In Comstock Residents Association v. Lyon County, it held that commissioners' communications about public business are public records even when they sit on private phones and private email accounts. So the law already reaches that inbox. The practical part is what interests us: mail on county servers is kept by county IT and searched when anyone files a records request. Mail in a private Gmail account is searched when you decide to search it, and the county has no way to check.

Three questions, then:

  1. Why Gmail?
  2. When a public records request touches your correspondence, who searches commissionerbayne@gmail.com, and how does the county confirm the search was complete?
  3. Did the county issue you an @nyecountynv.gov address, and if so, why is Gmail the one it publishes?

Maybe there is a good answer. Auto-forwarding into a county archive, retention software on the account, something we have not thought of. If there is, we want to print it.

So here is the offer: write to editor@nyeslies.com and we will run your answer in full, unedited, as its own post. No expiry date.

Our Who's Who page lists every elected official in the county, and the directory shows how county email addresses normally look. Readers who want to ask Commissioner Bayne themselves already have his address. It is the one the county gave us all.

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