Nye County scraps property maintenance code after months of debate

Nye County commissioners voted 5-0 on April 21 to remove the International Property Maintenance Code from county code, ending a fight that had stretched from a November proposal through months of public backlash and a failed attempt to expand the standards county-wide.

The vote wiped out a code that had been part of Nye County’s books since planning began in 2007, when the county adopted the 2006 version. County Manager Brett Waggoner said the county later updated it to the 2015 code and again to the 2018 International Property Maintenance Code in 2019. Even then, the standards were being enforced only in Pahrump, while planning officials had moved to extend them across the rest of the county.

That expansion effort first reached the board on Nov. 4, 2025, as Bill No. 2025-09. County staff said the bill would have clarified that the 2018 IPMC applied county-wide, kept building permits limited to the Pahrump Regional Planning District, and shifted appeals into Nye County Code Chapter 16.36. Staff initially set a public hearing for Dec. 2 in Tonopah, but the issue ran into immediate resistance from residents who said the language was too broad and too easy to interpret differently from one property to the next.

By the time commissioners took the bill up on March 3, the hearing had gone on for nearly an hour and a half and ended in a unanimous rejection. Commission Chairman Ron Boskovich said he did not think the IPMC should be part of the ordinance. Commissioner Bruce Jabbour pointed to a town hall in Amargosa Valley where roughly 250 people turned out angry, concerned, stressed and worried about the proposal. Commissioner John Koenig said putting the matter on the agenda was the easiest way to make it go away completely.

The April 21 item went further, asking commissioners for direction on whether the code should stay at all. During that discussion, Debra Strickland raised the practical question of whether scrapping the IPMC would leave the county without a way to deal with burned-out houses and other nuisance properties. Planning Director Steve Osborne said many of those cases would still fall under other county code provisions.

For homeowners and tenants, the change means Nye County has removed a much-criticized property maintenance standard instead of expanding it. For code enforcement, it narrows the county’s direct authority under the IPMC and shifts more of the work onto other nuisance, safety and health provisions already on the books. The fight over the code also underscored a broader clash in Nye County between private property rights and neighborhood standards, with public pressure again forcing a major policy reversal.