The Detention Center
Buena Vista County Jail
- Operated byBuena Vista County Sheriff's Office
- Jail address411 Expansion Blvd, Storm Lake, Iowa 50588-3512
- Rated capacity and daily populationNot found on any Buena Vista County page opened
- Day-to-day jail administratorAlyson Sievers, named as 'Jail Administrator Alyson Sievers' in the county's own March 12, 2024 supervisors minutes - an internal post under the elected sheriff, so jail_administrator stays null
- Federal prisonersThe county's own 2024 supervisors minutes repeatedly record the board accepting the 'Sheriff's Report of Federal Inmate Billings' (December 2023, January 2024 and February 2024 reports). The county therefore boards federal prisoners for a per-diem, but no rate is stated in the minutes, so `contracts` is 'no'. This is boarding revenue coming in, not federal funding of the jail.
- Visitation'Visitation is held over video conferencing by appointment only from 8am - 11am and 2pm - 4pm except for holidays, weekends, and when posted otherwise.' Sessions last up to 20 minutes and must be scheduled 24 or more hours in advance.
- Inmate telephone and commissaryPhone cards and inmate texting through Reliance Telephone; deposits through Access Corrections; commissary through mycarepack.com. No rates are published on the county's pages.
- What was triedThe jail page offers a 'View Current Inmate Roster' link pointing off-site to http://www.bvjail.com, which was not opened and so is neither cited nor scored; `roster` is therefore 'no' on the ground that no roster was verified. The county's own minutes PDF at https://buenavistacounty.iowa.gov/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/MIN-06-30-2026.pdf and the sheriff's office home page were both refused with PROVENANCE_REQUIRED on first attempt; the sheriff's home page was later reached through a search result.
Source: Buena Vista County Sheriff's Office - Jail · checked 2026-09-18
Transparency rating
1/10Closed- ✓The jail is named
- ✗Who is in custody — not published
- ✗Beds and daily population — not published
- ✗What it costs taxpayers — not published
- ✗Deaths in custody — not published
- ✗PREA audits — not published
- ✗Independent inspection — not published
- ✗Who else it holds, and for how much — not published
- ✗How to post bond — not published
- ✗Phone, video and commissary rates — not published
The Building
You paid for it. Here is what the record says it cost.
- Year builtNot found
- Original costNot found
- Paid for byNot found
- BedsNot found
Since then
- Not found
The Sheriff
Sheriff Kory Elston
- Runs the jailYes - the elected county sheriff. Iowa Code 356.2: 'The sheriff shall have charge and custody of the prisoners in the jail or other prisons of the sheriff's county,' repeated in the sheriff's general duties at Iowa Code 331.653(35).
- How the office is filledElected. Iowa Code 331.651 makes the office elective for a four-year term, requires the sheriff to be a certified peace officer (or to complete basic training within a year), and provides that on a vacancy the first deputy assumes the office.
- Source of nameThe sheriff's office site states he was 'Elected Sheriff in 2014' and has 'been serving in the Sheriff's department since 2000.' He is independently named as 'Sheriff Kory Elston' in the county's own Board of Supervisors minutes for March 12, 2024.
- First-party domainThe Buena Vista County Sheriff's Office runs its own separate domain, bvsheriff.com, which the county's own home page at buenavistacounty.iowa.gov links as its Sheriff entry. Per the brief, a sheriff's office on its own separate domain counts as first-party.
- Detention budget requested vs. approved, by year
- Jail staffing levels and vacancy rate
- Lawsuits and settlements involving the jail
Source: Buena Vista County Sheriff's Office · checked 2026-09-18
The Judges
Iowa district judges are merit-selected, not elected in contested races: a district judicial nominating commission (Iowa Code ch. 46 - five electors appointed by the governor, five elected by the resident bar, chaired by the judge of longest service) sends the governor two nominees, the governor appoints one, and the judge then faces a yes/no retention election and six-year terms. Iowa has 14 judicial election districts for nominating purposes. The official who actually sets bail at first appearance is a magistrate: Iowa Code 804.22 requires an arrested person to be taken 'without unnecessary delay...before the nearest or most accessible magistrate,' who 'shall fix the amount of bail or other conditions of release.' Iowa magistrates are appointed, not elected - Iowa Code 602.6501 puts a magistrate appointing commission in each county (one district judge, three members appointed by the county board of supervisors, and two attorneys elected by the county's attorneys), and 602.6403 has that commission appoint the county's magistrates to four-year terms. The three supervisor appointees are therefore the only voter-accountable link in how the person who sets bail in this county got the job. Judges and magistrates are state judicial officers, not county officials.
Iowa District Court (covers Buena Vista County)
- Not found - no judge was named on any Buena Vista County page opened
- The county's bond schedule
- Share of the jail population held pretrial
- Median time from booking to first appearance
Source: the state judiciary · checked 2026-09-18
The County Commissioners
They pay for the jail. The sheriff runs it.
- What they controlThe detention budget, the building itself, and the agreements that let other agencies rent its beds.
- What they don'tDay-to-day operations. The sheriff is separately elected and answers to voters, not to the board.
- The boardBoard of County Commissioners →
- Where the jail money is decidedAgendas and minutes →
Notes on the record
- The county's full 2024 Board of Supervisors minutes were opened and searched specifically for an IDOC jail inspection, capacity or population numbers, a jail budget line and boarding agreements with rates. The only jail matters in the year were the monthly federal inmate billing reports and a March 12, 2024 request by Sheriff Kory Elston and Jail Administrator Alyson Sievers to advertise and hire an additional jailer because a current jailer was being activated for a year. No inspection report is attached anywhere in the year.
- `roster` is 'no': the sheriff's jail page offers a current inmate roster, but the link goes off the sheriff's domain to bvjail.com, which was not opened. Nothing that was not read is being scored or cited.
- Buena Vista County's own home page links its Sheriff entry directly to bvsheriff.com. Because that is the sheriff's office's own separate domain rather than a third-party aggregator, it is treated as first-party for the transparency checks, per the brief.
- Iowa publishes no statewide dataset of deaths in county jail custody. Two duties exist and neither produces a public number: Iowa Admin. Code 201-50.22(14) requires the state jail inspection unit of the Department of Corrections to be 'notified within 24 hours of any death, attempted suicide, fire, escape, injury to staff or prisoners from assaults, or use of force and prisoner self-injuries'; and Iowa Code 127.3(1) requires an autopsy for a death 'in a prison, jail or correctional institution or under police custody, where there is not a natural disease process that accounts for the death,' routing it through the state medical examiner. The `deaths` check therefore passes only if this county itself publishes a death in its own custody, and none was found.
- Iowa Code 356.49 requires every sheriff to file a monthly written report with the IDOC director giving the number of men, women and juveniles held, so the population data exists inside IDOC, but no evidence was found that IDOC publishes it and there is no state jail-population page. `capacity` can therefore only pass on the county's own published numbers.
- Open records in Iowa run under Iowa Code ch. 22; the right is at 22.2 ('Every person shall have the right to examine and copy a public record'). There is no blanket response deadline - the only clock is 22.8(4), which caps delay taken to screen a record for confidentiality: 'a reasonable delay for this purpose shall not exceed twenty calendar days and ordinarily should not exceed ten business days.'
- Research constraint: WebFetch in this run would only open URLs that had appeared in one of the five permitted search results - the pre-authorised county home-page URLs supplied in the assignment and every link harvested from an already-opened page were refused with PROVENANCE_REQUIRED. Several known-to-exist county pages therefore could not be opened and so are not cited; they are listed under 'What was tried'.
- Board of Supervisors, five members serving staggered four-year terms by district: Kathy Croker (District 1), Kelly Snyder (District 2), Paul Merten (District 3), Rhonda Ringgenberg (District 4) and Dan Hartman (District 5). Official board meetings are held every Tuesday at 8:30 a.m. in the Board Room at the courthouse. The board is a statutory recipient of the county's IDOC jail inspection report under Iowa Code 356.43(4); the full year of 2024 minutes was opened and searched and contains no inspection report, no capacity or population figures and no per-diem rates.
These three offices decide who sits in a cell in Buena Vista County and what it costs the people who live here. Nationally, almost 77% of the people who died in local jails in 2019 had not been convicted of anything, and suicide was the leading single cause of those deaths (Bureau of Justice Statistics, Mortality in Local Jails, 2000–2019).
How much is your sheriff — and your judge — costing you?
Your VOTE is POWERFUL.
The sheriff who runs this jail is elected. So are the commissioners who pay for it.
Names verified 2026-09-18 · dollars and outcomes still being gathered