Miller gets $11,552 per month to ride the bench

It’s not bad for a part-time retirement gig.

This week the city council approved a salary including car allowance and health insurance allowance for once municipal judge and now interim municipal judge Victor Miller of $11,552.30 monthly or $138,627.60 annually. This amounts to the same salary Miller received as the appointed municipal judge but the car and health insurance allowances are now part of the base salary instead of being accounted for separately.

Per a city staff report included in the meeting agenda, a total of $129,627.68 has been budgeted. The difference was not discussed before the council voted unanimously to accept the figure.

In their final meeting of 2024, the city council made some preliminary moves toward finding a new judge and accepted the current judge’s offer to serve in an interim role until a replacement is found.

When Miller, the person who has — for four decades — served as both the elected Clark County justice of the peace overseeing a huge swath of county land that includes Boulder City, as well as serving as the appointed municipal judge for the city, announced late last year that he intended to retire as judge and not seek an eighth term as justice of the peace, it set up a change that really can only be described as “generational.”

Originally appointed by the city in 1984, Miller was also one of only two people in BC history (since incorporation in 1960) to serve as municipal judge while not also being the elected justice of the peace. Miller was judge but not justice between 1984 and 1994.

The city had known for nearly a year the Miller would be retiring as judge and had opted not to seek another term as justice of the peace. The office of justice was secured by Christopher Tilman back in June of last year when he got more than 50% of votes cast in the primary election.

However, at this point in time, not only is there no pool of candidates from which to choose a replacement, little discussion appears to have been given to a process for finding candidates.

In the council’s last meeting of 2024, Acting City Manager Michael Mays said, “So, we’d be looking for feedback on what you think that process should be and then we can bring back additional information if you have questions or want to get more information on processes of other jurisdictions, so that then you can decide how you want to move forward with the permanent position.”

Councilman Steve Walton expressed a desire at that time to hear how other jurisdictions handle this issue.

“I’m interested in staff finding similarly-structured communities with the relationship between council and municipal judge so that we could see what models there might be out there for us to then use as the jumping-off point for further discussion,” Walton said.

Multiple council members, including Cokie Booth and Denise Ashurst agreed, with Booth saying she would like to, “Look into the possibility of asking judges from Henderson or Las Vegas to come in and sit in on the interview and make recommendations for us. But I, too, would like to see us have some kind of feedback of how they do this and who does it and what kind of people could we expect to help us through this process.”

But finding a template may be harder than it looks like it should be. That is because when it comes to how the city determines who is going to be judge, Boulder City is very much an outlier.

State law actually says that judges should be elected. But because of a quirk involving the difference between a general statute and a special one, BC’s charter mandating the appointment of judge takes precedent. State law also allows municipalities to make the elected justice of the peace the “ex-officio” municipal judge, which means that the city does not actually appoint an individual. It instead says that whoever fills the role of justice, is also judge by right.

Because, historically, the same person has been both justice and judge with only two exceptions in city history, many residents may be under the mistaken impression that it’s an automatic thing and assumed that Tilman, who was sworn in as justice on Jan. 5, would be municipal judge by default.

But, back to the outlier issue. There are only two jurisdictions in Nevada where a judge is not either elected or appointed on an ex-officio basis, those being Boulder City and Yerington, a town of fewer than 4,000 souls in Lyon County.

It was expected that staff would present the council with some options at Tuesday’s meeting. However the only subject discussed was salary for Miller as interim. No timeline has been discussed for hiring a permanent replacement for Miller.