The Detention Center
Cerro Gordo County Law Enforcement Center
- Operated byCerro Gordo County Sheriff's Office
- Jail address17262 Lark Ave., Mason City, IA 50401, per the county's own jail page
- Jail administrator named by the countyAndrew Steenblock - listed as 'Jail Administrator' on the Sheriff's Office Contact Us page, and again in the Board of Supervisors' January 3, 2023 appointment minutes alongside jailer positions and 'Melinda Johnson Jail Nurse'. This is an internal role under the elected sheriff, not a separate county department, so jail_administrator is recorded as null per the sheriff-is-jailer rule.
- Jail population reportThe Sheriff's Office publishes an online jail population report on a county subdomain. The copy opened was headed 'CGSO Jail - Online Population Report Printed on July 28, 2026' and ended 'Total Records: 69'. It gives no rated bed capacity.
- BondThe jail page tells the public bond can be posted 24/7 and explains that a bondsman is needed where the citation shows a 'cash/surety' designation; it lists three named bail bond businesses with phone numbers.
- PREAThe jail page states the Sheriff's Office has a zero-tolerance policy for sexual misconduct and that allegations receive confidential investigation. That is a policy statement; no PREA audit result is published, so the prea check is no.
- Commissary and video visitationThe jail page links out to deposits.jailatm.com for commissary deposits and to a Prodigy video visitation instructions PDF and sign-in, but publishes no rates. Those are third-party vendor links.
- Beds / year built / costNot found on any Cerro Gordo County page opened.
- What was tried for an inspection reportFour Board of Supervisors documents on cerrogordo.gov were opened and searched for any IDOC jail inspection: the February 2, 2026 minutes, the July 20, 2026 agenda, the June 9, 2025 minutes and the August 9, 2016 agenda. None mentions a jail inspection, the Department of Corrections, jail capacity or an inmate housing contract. The January 3, 2023 minutes mention the jail only in staffing appointments. The Sheriff's 'Links & Resources' page was also opened and publishes no inspection report, rates or capacity.
Source: Cerro Gordo County, Iowa - Sheriff's Office, Jail · checked 2026-09-18
Transparency rating
3/10Closed- ✓The jail is named
- ✓Who is in custody
- ✗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
- ✗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 David Hepperly
- 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.' Iowa Code 331.653(35) repeats it in the sheriff's general duties.
- How the office is filledElective, four-year term (Iowa Code 331.651); the sheriff must be a certified peace officer or complete basic training within a year, and on a vacancy the first deputy assumes the office.
- Keeper's dutyIowa Code 356.5 requires the jail be kept clean and healthful, prisoners furnished bedding, clothing, towels, fuel and medical aid, served 'three times each day with an ample quantity of wholesome food,' given clean fresh water, an account kept of what is furnished, and a matron kept on the premises at all times while any female prisoner is held.
- Source of nameNamed as Sheriff on the Cerro Gordo County Sheriff's Office 'Contact Us' page and again on the county's Contact page, both on cerrogordo.gov, opened September 2026.
Still needed
- Detention budget requested vs. approved, by year
- Jail staffing levels and vacancy rate
- Lawsuits and settlements involving the jail
Source: Cerro Gordo County, Iowa - Sheriff's Office, Contact Us · checked 2026-09-18
The Judges
Iowa district judges are merit-selected, not elected in contested races: a district judicial nominating commission under 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; the judge then faces a yes/no retention election and, after winning retention, serves a six-year term. Iowa has 14 judicial election districts for nominating purposes. The official who actually sets bail 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's 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 Iowa Code 602.6403 has that commission appoint the county's magistrate(s) to four-year terms. The three supervisor appointees are the only voter-accountable link in how the bail-setting official got the job. Judges are state judicial officers, not county officials, and are not added to the vote line.
Iowa District Court - judges serving this county
- Not found - no judge is named on any county page opened. The county's own sheriff pages link out to the Iowa Judicial Branch's Judicial District 2 page for Cerro Gordo County, but that court page was not opened and is not a county-published source, so no judge is named here.
County magistrate(s) - the official who fixes bail at first appearance under Iowa Code 804.22
- Not found - no county or court page naming this county's appointed magistrate(s) was opened
Still needed
- 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
- Capacity is marked no even though the county publishes a jail population report on its own subdomain (sofiles.cerrogordo.gov), because no rated bed capacity is published anywhere that was opened. The population side of the check is met - 'Total Records: 69' on the July 28, 2026 printout - and the bed side is not.
- The Board of Supervisors publishes agendas, minutes, claims, meeting packets and YouTube video of its meetings at https://cerrogordo.gov/supervisors/meetings_minutes/, archived back through 2023. That archive is the most likely place a copy of the county's IDOC inspection report would surface; the documents opened from it contained none.
- Budget is marked no: no corrections or detention budget document was found on any Cerro Gordo County page opened.
- No county-published IDOC jail inspection report was found. Iowa does inspect: Iowa Code 356.43 requires the Iowa Department of Corrections and its inspectors to make periodic inspections of every jail and municipal holding facility, and Iowa Admin. Code rule 201-50.3 requires the chief jail inspector to 'visit and inspect each jail within this state at least annually,' with rule 201-50.2(3) allowing those visits to be unannounced and requiring jail staff to produce 'all books, records, medical records, data, documents and accounts.' The standards are mandatory under Iowa Code 356.36. But Iowa Code 356.43(4) routes the resulting report to only four recipients - the IDOC director, the sheriff or police chief, the local governing body, and the county attorney - and nothing requires anyone to post it. doc.iowa.gov has no jails, jail-standards or jail-inspections section, so there is no state page to read it on. This county does not publish its copy on its own site. That is the finding: the inspection happens annually and the result is unpublished.
- Deaths in custody: Iowa has no public dataset. 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.' Neither duty produces a published number. No death in this county's custody is published on the county's own site.
- Population and capacity: 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 data exists inside IDOC - but no evidence was found that IDOC publishes it, and there is no state jail-population page. Capacity therefore passes only from the county's own published numbers.
- Open records: 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.'
- Structure: Iowa Code 356A.1 lets a board of supervisors establish a detention facility 'in lieu of or in addition to the county jail,' in which case 'the sheriff shall not have charge or custody of a person detained or confined,' and Iowa Code ch. 28E is the vehicle behind genuinely regional facilities. Nothing opened for this county indicates either arrangement; no authoritative count exists of how many of Iowa's 99 counties operate their own jail, and none is asserted here.
- Method and budget: WebFetch in this session would only retrieve URLs that had appeared in a WebSearch result. Links harvested from pages that were successfully opened, and redirect targets reported by the fetcher, were both refused with PROVENANCE_REQUIRED and could not be opened. The hard cap of 5 WebSearch calls was therefore the binding limit on how many county pages could be reached, and all 5 were used.
- Board of Supervisors - three members, named on the county's own Contact page as Chris Watts (District 1), Casey Callanan (District 2) and Carl Ginapp (District 3). The same three appear in the board's own February 2, 2026 minutes as Chairman Casey Callanan, Vice Chairman Carl Ginapp and Supervisor Chris Watts, and on the July 20, 2026 agenda.
These three offices decide who sits in a cell in Cerro Gordo 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