With a jail bond referendum set to be on November’s ballot, the Johnson County Board of Supervisors have mixed sentiments on a new county jail.

The referendum needs 60 percent public support to pass and is a vote in which all people in an area are asked whether their government should borrow money to pay for something using bonds,  according to Cambridge Dictionary.

In a meeting on May 6, Supervisors Mandi Remington and V Fixmer-Oraiz raised concerns for the concept of a new jail. Remington said she supports a new jail but does not support the requested expansion or price tag. She said she disagreed that the county should spend this money other projects as well as the jail, such as a new fire department in Tiffin or field mediation.

Remington said she has long supported a one-to-one match with money given to the jail also given to public safety investments.

“It’s been brought to my attention that we have a fire department in Tiffin that’s just as old as the jail and they cannot safely bring teenagers in there for learning opportunities,” Remington said in the meeting. “They want to know why they have pancake breakfast while the sheriff’s office and paramedic departments don’t.”

In an interview with the DI, Supervisor Rod Sullivan said a new jail is extremely necessary at this time and has been in conversation since the 1990s, with it becoming a serious consideration when Sheriff Brad Kunkel took office in 2021.

Sullivan stressed that the supervisors have been completely transparent throughout this whole process and that if people are concerned about their transparency, he does not know what to tell them.

“People who don’t trust us to just do what we said we’re going to do, I don’t know what we can do about that because laws require us to be completely transparent and we’ve been completely transparent,” he said.

Sullivan said he supports the new jail because Johnson County is in need of it. He said it is the county’s responsibility to provide its citizens with adequate jail conditions, which he believes the current jail does not.

“Right now, we’re not able to provide the jail that we need for our county,” Sullivan said. “It’s just simply way too small and inadequate and unsafe.” 

He said the jail was built to hold 46 people, later becoming 92 when the state of Iowa told Johnson County they could double bunk. Eventually, Sullivan said standards changed and inmates were required to have more room than that allowed, but the county was grandfathered in.

“Over the last four or five years, the sheriff has just found it completely unworkable, so he has actually chosen to cap it at about 65,” he said in reference to the jail’s capacity.

RELATED: JoCo Board of Supervisors approves $549,000 for sheriff’s office study 

The new jail is planned to have 120 beds with the potential to add 20 more if necessary. Sullivan said it would include more outdoor space for inmates as well as other spaces for activities.

“We don’t ​​have space for counseling or classes or religious services or any number of things that a jail should offer, and we just can’t do it because there’s nowhere to do it,” Sullivan said.

Sullivan also highlighted that currently, taxpayers are having to pay a significant amount of money to house inmates in other counties because the Johnson County Jail is not large enough, which is a problem the new jail would solve. 

A report from the Johnson County Sheriff’s Office shows from 2024, $15.8 million was spent between January 2003 and December 2023 to house Johnson County inmates in other counties.

“That’s logistically a huge hassle, it’s very bad for the inmates themselves, it’s really bad for staff, and it’s really costly as a taxpayer,” he said. “That’s general fund money that could be spent on any number of positive things for the county or returned as lower taxes.”

In an interview with The Daily Iowan, Board of Supervisors Chair Jon Green discussed the process of building a new jail and where the county is in this process.

He said the board is currently trying to clean up their proposal for the bond council, and that after it is sent, it will take probably around six weeks for them to send it back. If all goes well, Green said construction will begin in August 2027 and that the public should know the location by next month at the latest.

He said the reason for the construction is clear from the results of the survey that was done by the University of Iowa Center for Social Science Innovation. Green said his takeaway from the survey is that the majority of Johnson County residents understand the current jail is unfit for service.

“If we’re having to spend millions of dollars on it just to keep it limping along, it isn’t good for the folks that we incarcerate there, it isn’t good for the people that we employ there,” he said.

At the meeting, multiple members of the community addressed the supervisors during public comment. 

During the May 6 meeting, Allison Bywater, a community member and fifth-year doctoral candidate at the UI, said her research heavily focuses on ethics and policy. 

She said in the past few weeks she has been reaching out with concerns to the supervisors, the Johnson County Sheriff’s Office, and the Center for Social Science Innovation at the university, the department that was contracted to perform a study on the potential new jail.

Bywater said she was concerned about how the study was being talked about with the public. She does not feel that the study provides enough guidance to use as a legitimate resource in the planning of the jail as it is not able to show that the majority of the county is in support.

“It doesn’t take an expert to look at this study and discern that the study is skewed and is not able to support the majority of Johnson County’s in favor of a new jail,” she said. “That’s not what this study can do.”

Bywater said she had offered to sit down with all of the supervisors, but that only Fixmer-Oraiz took her up on it, during which she said they had a productive conversation.

“I’ve received silence from most of you,” she said. “And from Supervisor Sullivan and Executive Director Shane, I received quite honestly demeaning emails referring to my very legitimate concerns as opinions or personal interests.”

Green recognized these concerns and said the board knows that the jail is a big and important topic in the community and they want to ensure they get it all right. He said he does not want all of the effort that has been expended over the past two and a half years to be for naught.

“I ​​hope that we get to a proposal that can win 60 percent support in the community because we’ve just been beating ourselves up over this for decades at this point,” Green said. “I hope that we can get to a solution so we can focus on other important stuff in Johnson County.” 

Editor’s Note: This story has been updated to more clearly reflect Supervisor Mandi Remington’s stance on the new jail. The Daily Iowan regrets this error.