As a walled city with a governor, it stands to reason that the city also had some sort of militia posted there. Their mandate would be to keep the peace (on King Artaxerxes’ behalf) in this corner of the empire, perhaps including Judea. By sharing his disdain for the Jews with the army, Sanballat was clearly seeking to influence the militia’s mind about the Jews.
2 And he said in the presence of his brothers and of the army of Samaria, “What are these feeble Jews doing? Will they restore it for themselves? Will they sacrifice? Will they finish up in a day? Will they revive the stones out of the heaps of rubbish, and burned ones at that?”