Esmeralda County

Esmeralda County has about seven hundred residents, which makes it the least populous county in Nevada and one of the least populous in the United States. It publishes a great deal: seven hundred and fifty-three documents since January 2023.

We could read ninety-four of them.

Start with what this page cannot show you

Eighty-seven per cent of this county’s record is scanned images. Not badly made PDFs: photographs of pages. We checked one by hand and it is a bilevel scan at 300 dots per inch containing twenty-nine characters of machine-readable text, which is the page number and not much else.

Of the county’s minutes, we could read none at all. Not one. So everything below is something the Board of Commissioners was asked to decide, and nothing below is something we can show it decided.

A further five hundred and sixty-one files on the county’s website have no date anywhere in their filename, so they could not be placed in the period we were reading and were left out.

This page is built on about six per cent of what the county publishes.

What is in those ninety-four documents

Cameras on county buildings, requested by the Sheriff or by a commissioner, funded from “an account to be determined by the Board of Commissioners”.

The courthouse is the largest of them, and the record gives two prices for it. On 17 June 2025 the Sheriff’s Office asked the commissioners to approve replacing “the existing Court House camera system as a cost of $91,551.45” from its service and supplies account. Eight days later, at a special meeting, the same request appeared twice on one agenda: that figure, and a second item for the same system “as a cost of $140,492.78 from Monarch”. Both versions cover removing the old equipment, installing the new, and a five-year service agreement.

Two prices for the cameras on one building, in a county of seven hundred people. The lower works out at about $130 a resident and the higher at about $200. Which one the board took, we cannot tell you, because the minutes of that meeting are a scan.

The three county fuel sites follow the same pattern. A camera system there “at a cost of $15,746.08” was on the June agendas twice, and at the special meeting it too was paired with a Monarch quote, “at a cost of $29,995.80”. County fuel is a real target in a place this remote, and cameras on a fuel tank are an unremarkable thing to want.

A commissioner brought cameras for the Fish Lake Valley Community Center to the board twice, the second time noting that the building “is owned by the county” and asking the board to “determine from which account funding will come”.

Separately, a renewal with Motorola Solutions “for software and onsite support for its current dispatch console at a cost of $37,232.63”.

What that adds up to

In the smallest county in Nevada, the surveillance on the readable record is a county watching its own property. A courthouse, three fuel sites, a community centre it owns.

There is no plate reader here that we could see, no drone, no facial recognition, no gunshot detection, no camera registry. There is no body camera item of any kind in the ninety-four documents we read, although the EFF Atlas records body-worn cameras at the Sheriff’s Office and Nevada law requires them, so they exist whether or not the readable record mentions them.

Six per cent coverage cannot support a claim about what this county does not have, and this page does not make one.

What this record does not cover

What the commissioners decided about any of it. The county’s minutes, all of which are scans. Every undated file on the county’s site. And whether the Sheriff’s Office has the written body camera policy state law requires.

Community contributors have mapped five devices in this county in OpenStreetMap. That count covers every agency and business at once and is never merged with anything above.