Iowa County

Notes on the record

• Iowa County is the most transparent jail in this group: it names the facility, publishes a 46-bed capacity and a 2006 build date, and explains how to post bond online. It does not publish the daily population.
• The county posts a deep Board of Supervisors agenda and minutes archive reaching back to 1995 at https://iowacounty.iowa.gov/supervisors/meetings/. The 2022 consolidated agenda file (https://iowacounty.iowa.gov/files/meetings/2022_agendas_55452.pdf, opened) shows jail business on the record: a public improvement project covering the jail kitchen and the Engineer's office with a public hearing on 21 October 2022, pay applications and a change order reviewed on 9 December 2022, an ARPA allocation resolution dated 2022-12-16 for the jail kitchen and secondary roads projects, a food service partnership renewal with Summit Food Service in May 2022, and reclassification of the Jail Administrator post to civilian deputy on 30 December 2022. No jail inspection report, jail population or capacity figure, corrections budget or per-diem housing agreement appears in that year's agendas.
• The ARPA item above is a one-off federal pandemic-relief allocation resolved for a specific kitchen project. It is not general operating money and nothing here should be read as the jail being federally funded - Iowa county jails run on county property and local taxes, with federal money entering only through per-diem boarding, SCAAP and grants of this kind.
• The 2022 agendas name a Sheriff Rob Rotter in a May 2022 item. That is a historical record, not the current officeholder: the live sheriff page names Todd Sauerbrei, and only the current name is recorded above.
• The county does publish a jail fee schedule - $20, $30 and $40 per day depending on how a sentenced person reports - at /sheriff/jail_accommodation_fees/. The fees check here asks specifically about phone, video visit and commissary rates, and those are not published: the visitation page says remote video visits carry a fee but gives no amount, and it gives no phone or commissary prices. The check is therefore recorded 'no' with the accommodation schedule noted here rather than counted.
• The jail page references PREA policy information, but no PREA audit result is published, so the prea check is 'no'.
• The county's older domain co.iowa.ia.us now 302-redirects to iowacounty.iowa.gov.
• Iowa inspects every jail annually - Iowa Admin. Code 201-50.3 requires the chief jail inspector to visit and inspect each jail in the state at least annually, and 201-50.2(3) allows the visit to be unannounced. But Iowa Code 356.43(4) routes the resulting report only to the IDOC director, the sheriff, the local governing body and the county attorney. Nothing requires it to be posted, doc.iowa.gov has no jail-inspections section, and this county does not publish its copy on its own site.
• Iowa publishes no statewide jail death 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 jail or under police custody where no natural disease process accounts for it. Neither duty produces a public number.
• 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.
• Open records 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 a delay taken to screen a record for confidentiality at twenty calendar days and says it ordinarily should not exceed ten business days.
• Board of Supervisors. The board "meets in regular sessions most Fridays at 9:00 a.m. in the Boardroom on the second floor of the East Annex, across the street from the Courthouse." Agendas and minutes are posted back to 1995, with 2023-2026 listed individually and 1995-2022 as consolidated yearly PDFs. Individual supervisor names are not published on the meetings page and were not confirmed elsewhere, so none are claimed. County Auditor Brandy Enochson is named in the agendas as calling meetings to order; she is not a supervisor.