HORACE LANGFORD, JR. / PVT Nye County Sheriff's Office Capt. Bill Becht (left), Assistant Sheriff Rick Marshall and Sgt. Jeff Grimaud watch the proceedings at the Pahrump Town Board meeting Tuesday. Becht and Marshall both said the incorporation feasibility study was flawed. Advertisement

The Nye County Sheriff's Office is officially neutral on the subject of incorporation, according to Nye County Sheriff Tony DeMeo.

Nevertheless, DeMeo and several other representatives attended Tuesday's Pahrump Town Board meeting to voice concerns about the feasibility study being presented that evening by the town's Incorporation advisory Board.

Bill Verbeck, of the advisory board, had earlier pointed out that if an incorporated Pahrump chose to maintain its own police force, it would be egregiously expensive. He advocated contracting out law enforcement safety to the sheriff's office.

"There are statutory obligations that I have that can not be superseded by a police department," DeMeo said. "Search and rescue being one of them, the force being another, civil issue being another, and if you go down the list there are a number of different things that I'm responsible for.

"Also, I'm responsible for the Health Department; I sit on that board, as well as with the liquor licensing board," he said. "So there are a lot of issues and a lot of finances that you got that they seem to gather from the sheriff's office and not being totally given to them because I have responsibilities not only in the rest of my jurisdiction of Nye County but Pahrump Valley as well."

DeMeo suggested tabling the item.

Assistant Sheriff Rick Marshall commended the board for their hard work but said it was "a flawed study."

"Nobody contacted the sheriff's office for information," Marshall said.

Verbeck later responded that when he went to the sheriff's office to gather information, he received a Tonopah phone number.

DeMeo later said that was the number for the sheriff's office main budget analyst.

Marshall said the list of personnel for the sheriff's office was not accurate. The number of personnel assigned to Pahrump in the study said 109, but Marshall said in actuality Pahrump only had 95 people assigned to the town, including dispatchers and office personnel.

In addition, Marshall said the $9.4 million the study had listed for the local sheriff's office was "a wrong assumption."

"The county's not going to give you $9 million out of the sheriff's budget," Marshall said. "That's just not going to happen, it's ludicrous to think that they're going to."

Although the budget assumption in the study were based on county audits, Marshall said those numbers could be misleading.

"Several line items are allocated to the Pahrump valley in our general budget, but they're for county-wide expenditures," Marshall said. "Just because it's allocated to the Pahrump Valley budget, does not mean it's spent in the Pahrump Valley."

Capt. Bill Becht also took issue with the study, although he congratulated the advisory board for their hard work.

"The problem with the study is it's based on conjecture there's no facts here," he said. "And the ones that I see are inaccurate."

Becht pointed out that funding for public services in Mesquite was $255 per $1,000 of assessed value and in Nye County it's about $35 per $1,000 of assessed value.

Supporting incorporation, Becht said, would likely lead to a tax rate increase.

He recommended having the board revise their budget numbers or possibly pay for a consultant to do a study.

"It's not something that's going to die this year and we can't resurrect it next year," Becht said.