During a recent Medicine Bow Town Council meeting, a local radio station owner asked if the town could cite a resident for a barking dog. The answer is no, Mayor Justin George explained, because no local ordinances can be enforced without a functioning marshal’s department. Nestled in the nort heastern corner of Carbon County, Medicine Bow is home to fewer than 250 people. Made famous by Owen Wister’s 1902 novel “The Virginian,” the small town today struggles with sustaining law and order in such a remote enclave. In early 2024, the Medicine Bow Town Council voted to dissolve its local law enforcement, the town’s Marshal’s Office. Soon after, the council traded three unused patrol cars, three rifles and $55,000 to the Carbon County Sheriff’s Office in return for 360 hours of annual patrol time. Before the agreement was finalized, Sheriff Alex Bakken made it clear that his deputies could not enforce local ordinances. Instead, deputies would spend the contracted time in Medicine Bow responding to emergency calls and monitoring traffic on Highway 30. Last summer, the contract came up for renewal. During their regular August meeting, Medicine Bow Town Council members publicly criticized the coverage the sheriff’s department provided, citing multiple alleged instances of deputies’ vehicles facing away from the highway as traffic passed through town without slowing down. Due to those allegations, and a lack of funding, the council unanimously voted not to continue the partnership, leaving the community without a law enforcement contract. Sheriff Bakken did not respond to a request for comment prior to publication.  Small-town justice Between its founding in the late 1860s and 2019, Medicine Bow relied entirely on Carbon County to provide law enforcement. In 2019, flush with impact assistance funding from nearby wind projects such as the Ekola Flats wind farm, the Town Council voted to allocate $1 million to establish a Town Marshal’s Office. The plan was to maintain local law enforcement as long as possible using the impact money, while the marshal and his deputies supplemented the operating budget by writing citations. But the experiment came to an abrupt end. In early 2024, with less than $400,000 left in the budget, the council decided to close the department and return law enforcement duties to the sheriff. Councilors said they had anticipated the funds would last longer than they ultimately did. The former Medicine Bow Marshal’s Office sits vacant. (Matt Copeland/WyoFile) With the Medicine Bow Marshal’s Office now shuttered, the town was left with tens of thousands of dollars’ worth of equipment, including guns, ammunition and patrol vehicles. In July of 2025, the council voted to sell the weapons and equipment to a local firearms dealer. That’s when the council concluded that much of the money allocated to the marshals had been spent inefficiently. In November 2025, Mayor Justin George ticked through an itemized list of leftover equipment from the closed office along with the cost to the town. As a whole, the governing body expressed disbelief at the amount of equipment purchased by the Medicine Bow Marshal’s Office during its five years of operation. As an example of waste, the mayor reported that the department spent nearly $2,000 on 5,200 rounds of 9mm ammunition for mandatory firearms training. However, an inventory revealed that every bullet was present, indicating no training had occurred. Additionally, the Marshal’s Office had purchased six $600 spike strips, three $200 combat-ready trauma bags with folding stretchers, three $120 bolt cutters, a $500 pair of Vortex-brand binoculars, and a black cowboy hat, valued at between $100 and $300. “That was ridiculous, that stuff they had,” Councilwoman Kristi Wickizer said at the November meeting. “It was beyond ridiculous.” Town policy allows department heads to spend up to $5,000 without prior approval from the council, the mayor said, adding that many of the questionable purchases fell just below the spending threshold. Medicine Bow is set to recover $8,000 from the firearms sale, money that will be used to pay off outstanding debts from the marshal’s five-year stint, including a $17,000 Motorola radio service bill. But two former mayors defended the marshal’s department, including its spending, and told WyoFile that they’re disappointed to see it disbanded.    In 2022, voters elected Sharron Biamon, who was on the council when the marshal’s department was established, as mayor. She resigned the following year, and Councilor Lucy Schofield was appointed to replace her as mayor. Schofield resigned that summer. While none of the elected officials responsible for the formation of the Medicine Bow Marshal’s Office are still on the council, both Biamon and Schofield said their councils fully supported how the department was run. Purchases had been approved and backed by the council, they said. They added that if the roughly $200,000 in annual ticket revenue had been reinvested into the Marshal’s Office, instead of going into the town’s general budget, the department would still be operating today. The price of enforcing laws Medicine Bow isn’t the only Wyoming town struggling to maintain a dedicated law enforcement agency. Twenty miles to the west, in the former coal-mining town of Hanna, local officials continue to wrestle with the cost of operating their own marshal’s office. Hanna was once a major supplier of coal for the Union Pacific Railroad. After more than a century of mining, however, the seams became increasingly difficult to reach, and by the early 2000s the last coal company had shut down. During the height of the coal era, the town established the Hanna Marshal’s Office to police its few thousand residents. With the mines now closed, Hanna’s population has fallen to fewer than 700. Despite the decline, the town continues to maintain its own law enforcement operation, now staffed by only two part‑time marshals. The Hanna Town Council has repeatedly said it cannot afford to hire any full-time officers. Many municipalities in Carbon County are turning to the Sheriff’s Office for the entirety of their law enforcement coverage. Like Medicine Bow once did, the towns of Riverside and Baggs signed memorandums of understanding, agreeing to pay the county to have deputies spend a set number of hours in each community. Carbon County commissioners have said towns that rely on the Sheriff’s Office for policing should help fund the department, especially in light of recent state property tax relief measures. When Carbon County saw 2025 property tax revenue drop by more than $900,000, commissioners cut services across a county spanning nearly 8,000 square miles. Providing legally required core services, such as water, sewer and law enforcement, is becoming increasingly expensive. In Saratoga, rising equipment costs have led the town, which still maintains its own police force, to cede emergency dispatching duties to the Carbon County Sheriff’s Office. Sheriff Alex Bakken has spent years studying if all dispatching services should be consolidated under his supervision, a prospect the Rawlins Police Department doesn’t fully support. Even as counties and municipalities struggle to provide law enforcement coverage, state legislators are pursuing additional cuts to property taxes — a primary mechanism of funding county and local governments — including proposals to eliminate residential property taxes entirely. Sheriff Bakken has said that consolidating all emergency dispatching services under one roof is inevitable. Facing increased costs and decreased funding, some local officials wonder whether the same may eventually apply to law enforcement departments themselves.  In the meantime, Medicine Bow residents must continue relying on the Sheriff’s Office, 40 miles away, for emergency response. The post Policing in Medicine Bow went boom, then bust, reflecting statewide funding challenges appeared first on WyoFile . ...read more read less