Letters to the Editor

Town board supporters counting on you not knowing history

Pahrump’s Town Board was disbanded in 2014 after recommending property tax increases exceeding 100 percent. Pahrumpians were so disturbed by Town Board’s actions, infighting, outright hostility to the public, and decisions that seldom reflected community needs that the people attempted a citizen’s arrest of the entire town board.

After that, the Board was disbanded in 2014. Fast forward to 2025 and we find almost all of the previous Town Board members pushing a resurrected Board. This push should be a warning sign to everyone in town.

The undeclared undercurrent here is that after the Town Board was disbanded, accounting mistakes led to the misallocation of town spending outlays for ten years. Town expenses were accidentally paid out of county accounts while most of the town’s allocated money went unspent. Last year, the new comptroller found that accounting mistake and corrected it but county commissioners have yet to take a vote to move money from the town accounts back to the county.

Now we have the same old players from the 2014 Town Board realizing the town has a large pot of cash that they would like to spend. Here we have an age-old problem for Nye County in that political “leaders” see money on a spreadsheet and they have to spend it as quickly as possible on fairgrounds, racetracks, off-road vehicle parks, and a boatload of contracted services, for which no one monitors contract compliance, meaning the county is continually ripped off by numerous business interests. Never mind the underfunded roads department and county buildings that are in disrepair, including a derelict and abandoned building 60 feet from where county commissioners meet.

In the last nine years, Nye County has been on fiscal watch (meaning bankrupt or very close to it with cash flow problems) for four of those years. We continually vote in political people, who have either multiple personal bankruptcies or no business acumen. Running a small business does not qualify anyone to run a $50 million dollar county government.

In 2023, the county board unknowingly passed a deficit budget most likely because they did not understand it or did not read it. Even in 2025, commissioners passed a budget, but two weeks later ignored it by piling on over a million dollars in non-emergency spending that exceeded the budget.

The Town Board’s recreation will not fix any of the systemic issues that continually put the county on fiscal watch and bankruptcy every 7-10 years for decades. We do not need a Pahrump Town Board resurrection. Instead we need legislation establishing qualifications for office—people with an education on how to run the government, people without larceny in the heart, people who can consistently pass a drug and alcohol test, and people without indictments, FBI raiding their homes, or a criminal record.

I have no desire to watch history repeat itself—watching people so disenfranchised and taxed that they feel they need to do a citizen’s arrest to get their town back. If you doubt my veracity, here’s a link to the town board minutes that were removed from the county website when the resurrection push started: https://www.mediafire.com/folder/gl2wnf4mzayfz/Pahrump+Town+Board+Minutes+2011-14.

Tony Holm

United States Government (retired)