The Detention Center
Not found — the county publishes a Jail Inmate Roster but gives the facility no published name on any page opened
- Operated bySioux County Sheriff's Office
- Sheriff's office and jail address210 Central Ave SW, PO Box 18, Orange City, IA 51041
- Sheriff's office phone712-737-2280 (county departments page)
- RosterThe county serves a PDF headed 'SIOUX COUNTY SHERIFF'S OFFICE — Jail Inmate Roster' at a fixed URL under its own /sheriffdocs/ path. The copy served when it was opened on 18 September 2026 is still stamped 'Updated on: 11/10/2021 @ 09:00' and lists 41 people with date booked in, name, reason booked (including FEDERAL HOLD, ARREST/INT APP, SERVE SENTENCE, WARRANT and COURT ORDER) and the charge description. No bond amounts are shown
- Holds federal detaineesThe roster's reason-booked column includes FEDERAL HOLD, but no agreement and no per-diem rate is published anywhere on the county's site
- Jail budgetThe Board of Supervisors agenda for February 24, 2026 sets an 'FY27 Sheriff Budget Review' with the sheriff, but no dollar figure for the sheriff or the jail was found on any county page opened
- StaffingA county news post dated 24 July 2026 advertises full-time male and female detention officer (jailer) openings, and the February 10, 2026 board agenda has the sheriff before the board to 'Discuss Jail Position'
- Rated capacity, beds, year built, costNot found on any Sioux County page opened
- What was triedhttp://www.siouxcountysheriff.com/ — the sheriff's own separate domain, linked from the county's departments page — refused every fetch attempt and could not be opened. The county's old domain siouxcounty.org now 302-redirects to siouxcountyia.gov. Opened on the county domain: /departments/, /departments/supervisors/, /departments/supervisors/resolutions/, the home page, the 24 July 2026 jailer job post, the Feb 10/24 2026 board agenda, and the three /sheriffdocs/ PDFs (jail inmates, warrant list, arrest press log)
Source: Sioux County Sheriff's Office — Jail Inmate Roster · checked 2026-09-18
Transparency rating
1/10Closed- ✗The jail is named — not published
- ✓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 — 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 Nate Huizenga
- TitleSioux County Sheriff
- Runs the jailYes — Iowa Code 356.2 gives the sheriff charge and custody of the prisoners in the county jail; the county's departments page records the sheriff's office as handling 'Law Enforcement, Jail, Comm Center'
- How the office is filledElected countywide to a four-year term (Iowa Code 331.651); on a vacancy the first deputy assumes the office. The county's resolutions index lists a resolution 2022-47 'Appoint County Sheriff' from September 2022, but that PDF could not be opened, so nothing is asserted about how the current sheriff first took office
- How the name was confirmedThe Board of Supervisors agenda covering the meetings of February 10 and February 24, 2026 lists 'Nate Huizenga, Sioux County Sheriff, Discuss Jail Position' and 'Nate Huizenga, Sioux County Sheriff, FY27 Sheriff Budget Review'
- Sheriff's office phone712-737-2280; communication center 712-737-3307 (county departments page)
- Sheriff's office address210 Central Ave SW, PO Box 18, Orange City, IA 51041
Still needed
- Detention budget requested vs. approved, by year
- Jail staffing levels and vacancy rate
- Lawsuits and settlements involving the jail
Source: Sioux County Board of Supervisors — agenda, February 10 and 24, 2026 · 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. Bail at first appearance is set by a magistrate, not a district judge: 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 magistrate or magistrates to four-year terms. The three supervisor appointees are the only voter-accountable link in how the official who sets bail got the job. Judges are state judicial officers, not county officials, and are not added to the vote line.
Magistrate - the officer who fixes bail at initial appearance (Iowa Code 804.22)
- 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 →
- Where the jail money is decidedAgendas and minutes →
Notes on the record
- Sheriff Nate Huizenga is named on the county's own domain in the Board of Supervisors agenda covering the meetings of February 10 and February 24, 2026, which list him twice as 'Nate Huizenga, Sioux County Sheriff' — once to discuss a jail position and once for the FY27 Sheriff Budget Review. No Sioux County page that names him alongside a term of office was opened. The sheriff's office runs its own separate site at www.siouxcountysheriff.com, which would count as first-party, but it refused every fetch attempt and nothing from it is cited.
- Iowa does inspect this jail every year, but nobody publishes the result. Iowa Code 356.43 requires the Iowa Department of Corrections to make periodic inspections of every jail, and Iowa Admin. Code 201-50.3 requires the chief jail inspector to visit and inspect each jail in the state at least annually; 201-50.2(3) allows those visits to be unannounced, with jail staff required to produce all books, records, medical records, data, documents and accounts. The standards themselves are mandatory under Iowa Code 356.36. But Iowa Code 356.43(4) routes the resulting report to only four places - the IDOC director, the sheriff, the local governing body and the county attorney - and nothing requires anyone to post it. doc.iowa.gov has no jails or jail-inspection section. This county does not publish its own copy on any page that could be opened, so state_inspection is recorded empty. That is the finding, not a gap in the search.
- Sioux County's website moved: the older siouxcounty.org addresses now 302-redirect to siouxcountyia.gov. Both are treated here as the county's own domain.
- The roster is genuinely first-party and sits at a fixed URL under the county's own /sheriffdocs/ path, but the copy served when it was opened on 18 September 2026 is still stamped 'Updated on: 11/10/2021 @ 09:00' — the same date a previous check recorded, so it has not been refreshed. The two other PDFs in that same folder carry the identical stamp: the warrant list is headed 'Updated on: 11/10/2021 @ 09:00' and the arrest press log is headed 'Arrest Press Log For Sioux County 10/12/2021 thru 11/10/2021 @ 09:00'. The whole /sheriffdocs/ folder therefore appears frozen at 10 November 2021, nearly five years stale. The roster check is recorded yes because the county publishes it itself on its own domain; the staleness is recorded here rather than hidden, and the file does not show who is in custody now.
- The named check is recorded no because no page opened gives the facility a name. The county publishes a Jail Inmate Roster headed only Sioux County Sheriff's Office, and a 2026 jailer job posting, but never writes a facility name such as Sioux County Jail.
- The roster shows people booked on a FEDERAL HOLD, so the jail does hold detainees for another agency, but Sioux County publishes no agreement and no rate for that, so contracts is recorded no.
- The county's departments page sends budget seekers off its own domain, to the state's Public Access to Local Government Budgets site at dom-localgov.iowa.gov. That is a state site, not the county publishing, so budget is recorded no.
- Iowa publishes no statewide dataset of deaths in county custody. Iowa Admin. Code 201-50.22(14) requires the state jail inspection unit 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, and this county publishes none of its own.
- Public records in Iowa 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.
- Iowa county jails run on county property and local taxes. Federal money reaches them only through per-diem boarding, SCAAP and grants.
- Board of Supervisors, five members elected by district. The board's own page lists: 1st District John Degen (Vice Chairman), 2nd District Jerry Muilenburg (Chairman), 3rd District Dan Altena, 4th District Carl Vande Weerd, 5th District Craig Hoftyzer. The same five are recorded present in the board's minutes of 13 January 2026. To be placed on the agenda the board's page gives (712) 737-2216. The resolutions index lists annual budget and appropriation resolutions (for example 2026-23 Approve Budget — Certify Taxes FY27 and 2026-30 Appropriation Resolution FY2027) and a 2022-47 Appoint County Sheriff, but no resolution on its face concerns jail operations, inspection, inmate boarding or per-diem rates. The board's own budget link sends readers off the county domain to the state's Public Access to Local Government Budgets site at dom-localgov.iowa.gov. The board-minutes index at https://siouxcountyia.gov/departments/supervisors/board-minutes/ is listed on the supervisors page but could not itself be opened.
These three offices decide who sits in a cell in Sioux 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