The Detention Center
Hardin County Jail, in the Hardin County Correctional Center
- Operated byHardin County Sheriff's Office
- Detention commandNick Whitmore — Jail Administrator
- Jail addressLaw Enforcement Center, 1116 14th Avenue, Eldora, IA 50627 (641-939-8189; toll free 800-568-4373). Office hours Monday - Friday, 8:00 am - 4:00 pm.
- Capacity'The center contains 90 beds and room for 8 detainees in the holding areas.'
- Built'The Hardin County Law Enforcement Center was completed in July 2000.' The sheriff's page adds that the building houses the sheriff's office, the communications centre and the county jail. No construction cost or funding source is published.
- Jail AdministratorNick Whitmore
- Room and board fee'There is a room and board fee of $50 per day while in the Correctional Center. A day is defined as any 24-hour period or any portion thereof.'
- Custody notificationsIowaVINE registration is offered for inmate custody-status notifications. No public roster of who is in custody now was found.
- Not publishedThe Jail page publishes no bond or bail posting guidance, no roster, no daily population, no phone, video-visit or commissary rates, and nothing about housing inmates for other counties or agencies.
- What was triedOpened https://www.hardincountyia.gov/jail , https://www.hardincountyia.gov/correctional-center-facility , https://www.hardincountyia.gov/arranging-jail-time , https://www.hardincountyia.gov/sheriff , https://www.hardincountyia.gov/patrol , https://www.hardincountyia.gov/board-of-supervisors , https://www.hardincountyia.gov/supervisor-duties , https://www.hardincountyia.gov/your-government . Returned 403: the staff directory in all four of its forms, https://www.hardincountyia.gov/visitation , https://www.hardincountyia.gov/agendas , and the supervisors' minutes and agenda-packet PDFs under /media/Agenda%20Center%20Documents/ for June 2019 and December 2020.
Source: Hardin County - Correctional Center Facility · checked 2026-09-18
Transparency rating
2/10Closed- ✓The jail is named
- ✗Who is in custody — not published
- ✓Beds and daily population
- ✗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 built2000 - 'The Hardin County Law Enforcement Center was completed in July 2000'
- Original costNot found
- Paid for byNot found
- Beds90 beds, plus room for 8 detainees in the holding areas
Since then
- Not found
The Sheriff
Sheriff Not found
- 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; on a vacancy the first deputy assumes the office. The county's own Supervisor Duties page confirms the office is elective: 'Citizens elect a county Auditor, Recorder, Attorney, Sheriff, Treasurer and a 3-5 member county Board of Supervisors.'
- Keeper's dutyIowa Code 356.5 requires the keeper to keep the jail clean and healthful; furnish bedding, clothing, towels, fuel and medical aid; serve each prisoner three times each day with an ample quantity of wholesome food; furnish clean fresh water; keep an account of what is furnished; and keep a matron on the premises at all times while any female prisoner is held.
- Current officeholderNot found. Hardin County publishes a detailed sheriff's section that never names the sheriff, and every page that would carry the name returns 403: https://www.hardincountyia.gov/staff-directory , https://www.hardincountyia.gov/staff-directory/Sheriff , https://www.hardincountyia.gov/directory.aspx?EID=39 and https://hardincountyia.gov/directory.aspx?EID=32 . No name is recorded rather than risk naming someone who has left office.
- Who runs the facilityThe Hardin County Sheriff's Office operates the Hardin County Correctional Center within the county's Law Enforcement Center.
- What the office coversThe sheriff's office page states the office serves the county's unincorporated areas and eight contracted cities. That is a law-enforcement services arrangement, not an agreement to hold other agencies' prisoners, and no rates are published for it.
Still needed
- Detention budget requested vs. approved, by year
- Jail staffing levels and vacancy rate
- Lawsuits and settlements involving the jail
Source: Hardin County Sheriff · checked 2026-09-18
The Judges
Iowa judges are not county officials and are not elected in contested races. District judges are merit-selected: a district judicial nominating commission (Iowa Code ch. 46) sends the governor two nominees, the governor appoints one, and the judge then stands in a yes/no retention election for six-year terms. 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 Iowa Code 602.6403 has that commission appoint the county's magistrates to four-year terms. The three supervisor appointees are the only voter-accountable link in how the bail-setting official got the job. No magistrate for this county was named from a source actually opened.
Iowa District Court - magistrate who sets bail at initial appearance
- Not found
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 →
Notes on the record
- Hardin County is the strongest publisher in this group on the physical facility: it names the Hardin County Correctional Center, gives its address, states 90 beds plus 8 holding places, gives the July 2000 completion date of the Law Enforcement Center and names the jail administrator, Nick Whitmore.
- It still does not name the sheriff. Every page that would carry the name - the staff directory in all four of its published forms - returns 403 to automated retrieval, and the Sheriff, Patrol, Jail and Correctional Center pages describe the office in detail without ever giving the officeholder's name. A county that publishes its jail's bed count but not the name of the elected official responsible for it is an unusual combination, and it is recorded here rather than papered over with a guess.
- The county seat is Eldora, confirmed from the county's own Board of Supervisors page, which places the board office at 1215 Edgington Ave, Eldora.
- The board roster carries an internal warning sign: the page gives BJ Hoffman's term as expiring December 2024, a date now past, while the other two seats run to December 2026. The names are recorded as the county publishes them, with that caveat attached.
- The 'capacity' check is marked yes on the 90-bed figure. The county publishes the rated bed count but does not publish a daily population, so only half of what that check asks for is actually available.
- The county publishes a $50-per-day room and board fee for people serving jail time (https://www.hardincountyia.gov/arranging-jail-time). The 'fees' check asks about phone, video-visit and commissary rates, none of which are published, so that check is marked no and the $50 figure is recorded here instead.
- The sheriff's office page states the office serves the county's unincorporated areas and eight contracted cities. That is a contract for policing services, not for holding other agencies' prisoners, and no rates are published, so the 'contracts' check remains no.
- The supervisors' agendas page and the minutes and agenda-packet PDFs under the county's media directory all return 403, so the place where an IDOC jail inspection report would most likely surface could not be searched. 'inspections' is marked no on the basis that nothing was found, not that nothing exists.
- No construction cost and no funding source for the 2000 Law Enforcement Center were published. Nothing is asserted about how it was paid for.
- 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 and population can only be judged from what the county itself publishes.
- 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. Neither is published.
- Open records run under Iowa Code chapter 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.'
- Board of Supervisors (Iowa counties have supervisors, not commissioners) - three members serving staggered four-year terms, as the county's own board page states. The page lists Lance Granzow (Chair), Renee McClellan (Vice Chair) and BJ Hoffman. Treat the roster with care: the same page gives Granzow's and McClellan's terms as expiring December 2026 but Hoffman's as expiring December 2024, a date already past, so the third seat may have changed since the page was written. The board office is at 1215 Edgington Ave, Eldora, IA 50627. The page says minutes are available in the County Auditor's office and published in local newspapers, and links to 'View Most Recent Agendas and Minutes', but the county's agendas page (https://www.hardincountyia.gov/agendas) returns 403, so no minutes URL is recorded.
These three offices decide who sits in a cell in Hardin 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