Nye County quietly converted its jail staff from civilian technicians into sworn deputies, more than doubling the headcount just as federal detainees arrived. The detainees left. The payroll stayed. The Sheriff is still asking for armored vehicles.
In 2019 the Nye County jail had twenty employees, every one of them holding the same title: Detention Technician. The highest paid was Amy Krueger at $55,205. More than half were tagged in county payroll records with the notation (ICE).
In 2025 the jail had forty-three. Twenty-eight are now sworn: twenty-five Detention Deputies and three Detention Sergeants. The highest paid is Sergeant Michael Cleveland at $149,936, or $245,757 with benefits.
The top salary inside the Nye County jail rose 172 percent in six years. Nobody voted on that. It happened through job titles.
When it happened
County payroll records let you watch it occur.
Year | Jail staff | Titles present | Top pay |
|---|---|---|---|
2019 | 20 | Detention Technician only | $55,205 |
2021 | 19 | Still technicians only | $62,150 |
2023 | 49 | Deputy and Sergeant appear. 16 tagged (ICE) | $100,451 |
2025 | 43 | 28 sworn, 12 civilian. No ICE tags | $149,936 |
Between 2021 and 2023 the jail workforce grew 158 percent and acquired a class of sworn, higher-paid positions that had not previously existed in the county.
Sheriff Sharon Wehrly held office from January 2015 to January 2023, and the ICE contract began under her around 2020. Sheriff Joe McGill took office in January 2023, the first full payroll year in which the sworn titles appear.
ICE terminated the contract on November 5, 2024. The detainees were gone within hours and roughly $2 million a year in revenue stopped. The jail workforce fell from 49 to 43. Six people.
The county built a detention operation around a federal contract, upgraded it into a sworn workforce, lost the contract, and kept nearly all of it.
You can follow individuals through the conversion. Joshua Kerns was a Detention Technician (ICE) earning $24,045 in 2019; by 2023 his title had changed to Detention Deputy, and in 2025 he earned $78,187, a 225 percent increase in six years. Michael Cleveland appears in 2023 as a Detention Sergeant (ICE) at $78,107 and in 2025 at $149,936, up 92 percent in two years, making him the highest paid employee in the entire sheriff's office, patrol included.
Cleveland is also one of four supervisors who sued Wehrly, Capt. David Boruchowitz and Nye County in October 2022 alleging retaliation for backing McGill's campaign. Nothing in the payroll indicates impropriety, and large single-year jumps in a 24-hour facility usually mean overtime, promotion or an accrual payout. The county has simply never explained it.
Where the common assumption breaks
The instinct that jail work now pays better than the road is half right, and the wrong half matters. Excluding partial-year hires and departures under $40,000:
Role | Count | Median pay | Highest |
|---|---|---|---|
Patrol Deputy | 45 | $81,751 | $122,923 |
Detention Deputy | 22 | $80,199 | $98,386 |
Detention Sergeant | 3 | $122,580 | $149,936 |
Detention Technician | 11 | $45,037 | $57,211 |
A detention deputy and a patrol deputy make almost the same money. The median gap is $1,552, under two percent. Anyone claiming the jail out-pays the road at deputy level is wrong.
Detention sergeants are the highest paid people in the sheriff's office. Cleveland out-earns the top patrol deputy by $27,012. The competition is not the jail versus the road. It is three sergeant slots in a jail that no longer holds federal detainees.
The number that explains everything
Nye County advertises a starting deputy salary of $45,281 to $47,091. McGill has used that figure to explain why he cannot compete with Las Vegas Metro's $59,321.
The actual median total pay for a Nye County patrol deputy in 2025 was $81,751. That is 1.8 times the advertised starting salary.
Some of the spread is seniority and rank. Much of it is overtime, and the county's financial filings confirm it independently: total salary spending rose about 15 percent while headcount fell 26 percent. You cannot pay more money to fewer people any other way.
The county is not underpaying its deputies. It is underpaying them on paper and overpaying them in hours, which is the most expensive way to run an agency and the least appealing way to work in one.
The payroll contradicts the county's own filings
This should worry the commission most.
Nye's quarterly reports to the state show the Pahrump sheriff's unit at 112 personnel in fiscal 2024, 84 in fiscal 2025, and 62 by March 2026. A loss of fifty people, 45 percent.
The payroll does not show that. In calendar 2023 it lists 63 patrol deputies and 49 detention staff, 112 total, matching the county's filed figure exactly. By 2025 it lists 50 patrol and 43 detention, 93 people. A decline of nineteen, or 17 percent.
The county told the state it lost fifty. Its own payroll shows nineteen.
Some of the gap is method. Payroll counts everyone paid during a calendar year including mid-year arrivals and departures, so it runs high, and the filings are fiscal years. Those effects are real. They do not account for a thirty-one person discrepancy in a department of under a hundred people.
Either the county is misreporting personnel to the state, or it is counting something in those filings it has never defined publicly. No one has ever asked.
Now put the equipment request beside it
On May 6, 2026, McGill asked the commissioners for $1,034,500 in capital. Nearly half of it, $500,000, was a new BearCat armored vehicle. Then $90,000 for three motorcycles, $80,000 for four drones, $52,000 each for a FARO scanner and Tasers, $43,000 for stationary license plate readers, $40,000 for SWAT body armor, $30,000 for lights at the shooting range, and $19,000 for NightHawk investigative software. Eleven smaller items followed, down to $2,500 for carpet and $1,500 for a shredder.
Sixteen items totaling $944,500 against a request of $1,034,500. Ninety thousand dollars is unaccounted for on the page commissioners voted from.
Fourteen days later, Comptroller Zena Teich told the commission: "We have a shortfall of, rounded, $11 million."
Twenty-one days later, the commission cut services and supplies 32 percent, took $1.2 million from salaries, reduced the jail fund transfer by $1.5 million, and closed the year with $170,702 against a reserve policy calling for roughly $8 million.
-County Manager Brett Waggoner described the process: "You give the number and let us figure out how we're going to get there."
-Commissioner Bruce Jabbour, looking at the final figure: "$170,000 doesn't really give us flexibility, in case of an emergency."
-Commissioner Debra Strickland, on the same package: "Excellent."
In July, two months after requesting $80,000 for drones, McGill publicly cited budget constraints on drone purchases. That is only consistent if the commission denied the request, which would itself be news, and which nobody has reported either way.
The honest verdict
The strongest case against this department is not that it spends too much. On the numbers, it does not. Adjusted for inflation the Pahrump operation spends about 7 percent less than before the ICE contract, with roughly a third fewer people. Anyone who says the sheriff caused an $11 million county deficit is not reading the filings.
The real case is judgment.
A jail workforce was converted from civilian to sworn, more than doubled on the back of a federal contract, and never converted back when the contract ended. A capital request went to the commission with half its value in an armored vehicle and $90,000 that does not reconcile, two weeks before the county announced it was eleven million short. And $2,456,707 in restricted public safety sales tax money sits accumulating in the sheriff's fund, up 152 percent since fiscal 2022, while the general fund holds $170,702. In four outlying communities the filings carry a one-line explanation for a full year of unspent public safety money: "Spend Plan was not approved by Board resulting in no spending."
This did not start with McGill
Sheriff Tony DeMeo, 2003 to 2015, overspent by $1.03 million in fiscal 2012 and more than $700,000 the year before, on a roughly $12 million budget. On October 17, 2012 the commission voted 4 to 0 to refer him to the Nevada Attorney General. District Attorney Brian Kunzi, who holds the same office today, said then: "He spent it. Most of it's overtime." The Attorney General declined to charge.
Sheriff Sharon Wehrly, 2015 to 2023. The county's auditor Dan C. McArthur Ltd., examining fiscal 2018 and 2019, found "Sheriff's Office: multiple budget overages violating NRS." Nye County spent 2019 through 2021 reporting weekly to the Nevada Department of Taxation.
Sheriff Joe McGill, 2023 to present. No audit finding, no charge, no ethics complaint. He inherited the conversion and the deficit both yet continues it.
Two sheriffs, two administrations, the same statutory violation eight years apart. Nobody has ever put those findings side by side.
The questions
To Comptroller Zena Teich, (775) 751-6390: Why does the county report 62 sheriff's personnel to the state when its payroll shows 93? What is the unreconciled $90,000 in the May 6 capital request?
To Sheriff McGill: When and why were detention technician positions converted to sworn deputies and sergeants, who approved it, and what did it add to annual payroll? Why did the jail workforce stay at 43 after the federal detainees left? In July you said the budget would not allow drones. In May you asked for $80,000 worth.
To the commissioners: Did anyone notice the itemized capital request was $90,000 short of its own total? Why is $2.46 million in restricted public safety money sitting unspent while the general fund holds $170,702?
No available 2024 report. Salary figures are from Nye County payroll records published by TransparentNevada for 2019, 2021, 2023 and 2025. Departmental spending and personnel counts are from the county's reports filed under Section 17.5 of the Nye County Sales and Use Tax Act of 2007, at nyecountynv.gov/1015/PSST-Reporting. The capital request is the Board of County Commissioners staff report of May 6, 2026, agenda item 10401. Budget quotations are from Pahrump Valley Times coverage of the May 20 and May 27, 2026 meetings. Median pay excludes records under $40,000, typically partial-year hires and departures. Payroll years are calendar years and county filings are fiscal years.
