The Detention Center
Story County Jail (in the Story County Justice Center)
- Operated byStory County Sheriff's Office — Jail Division
- Named by the county"Story County Jail" — the county's Jail Information page
- Beds104 beds (county Jail Information page)
- OpenedMarch 2002 (county Jail Information page)
- Address used for mail and commissaryStory County Jail, 1315 S B Ave., Nevada, IA 50201
- How the Justice Center was paid forGeneral obligation bonds issued in three tranches for Justice Center construction — $2,700,000 (December 1998), $5,000,000 (September 1999) and $5,000,000 (August 2000); $6,890,000 was still outstanding as of July 1, 2007 at an average 4.92% interest, maturing June 30, 2014 (County of Story FY2009 Adopted Annual Budget)
- Jail staffingThe FY2009 Adopted Annual Budget shows the Jail division as the Sheriff's largest, with 37.5 employees of the office's roughly 82.5 full-time positions at that time
- Average daily populationNot published on the county's site
- RosterThe county does not host a roster on its own domain; its Jail Information page links out to a vendor site (cip2c.com). Off-domain vendor listings are not counted here.
- VisitationOn-site video visits are free, 30 minutes, once a week, Monday–Friday; remote visits run daily 8:30 a.m.–10 p.m. through the HomeWAV app and the county states "There is a fee for remote visitation" without publishing the rate
- CommissaryAccess Corrections is the vendor; deposits by phone (866) 394-0490, online, at a lobby kiosk, or by certified money order. No deposit-fee schedule is published.
- What was triedhttps://www.storycountyiowa.gov/1637/2024-PREA-Annual-Report and the PREA Policy PDF (DocumentCenter/View/5737) are both linked from the county's own jail quick-links page but could not be opened, so nothing from them is cited. The Board of Supervisors packet of 12/22/2020 was read in full and contains no jail inspection report, no housing contract and no per-diem rate.
Source: Story County — Jail Information · checked 2026-09-18
Transparency rating
3/10Closed- ✓The jail is named
- ✗Who is in custody — not published
- ✓Beds and daily population
- ✓What it costs taxpayers
- ✗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 built2002 — the Story County Jail opened in March 2002 as part of the Story County Justice Center
- Original costNot found as a single figure. $12,700,000 in general obligation bonds was issued for Justice Center construction in three tranches (1998, 1999, 2000) per the FY2009 Adopted Annual Budget; the budget does not state a total project cost.
- Paid for byCounty general obligation bonds, repaid from county revenues. Iowa county jails run on county property and local taxes; no federal funding is claimed here.
- Beds104
Since then
- Not found
The Sheriff
Sheriff Paul Fitzgerald
- Runs the jailYes — the elected sheriff, under 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") and Iowa Code 331.653(35). The county's own page lists a Jail Division as one of the Sheriff's Office's five divisions.
- How the office is filledElected to a four-year term under 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
- Office1315 South B Ave., Nevada, IA 50201; admin line (515) 382-7458, main (515) 382-6581
- Agency sizeThe county's About the Sheriff's Office page states 90 full-time employees serving about 97,000 residents across 576 square miles, organised into Administrative, Communications, Field Services, Jail and Support Services divisions
- Detention budget requested vs. approved, by year
- Jail staffing levels and vacancy rate
- Lawsuits and settlements involving the jail
Source: Story County — A welcome message from Sheriff Fitzgerald (Sheriff's Office page) · checked 2026-09-18
The Judges
Iowa's 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.
Iowa District Court — district judges for this county's judicial election district
- Not found
Magistrate — the officer who fixes bail at initial appearance (Iowa Code 804.22)
- Not found
- 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 yes on the strength of the published 104-bed figure alone. Story County does not publish an average daily population or any monthly count on its own site.
- roster is marked no because the county publishes no roster on its own domain — the Jail Information page links out to a third-party vendor site, which under this project's rules is not the county publishing.
- prea is marked no only because the two PREA pages the county links from its own jail quick-links page (a PREA Policy PDF and a 2024 PREA Annual Report page) could not be opened here. The county does appear to post PREA material; nothing from it is cited because nothing from it was read.
- fees is marked no because, although the county states plainly that remote video visitation carries a fee, it publishes no rate for video visits, phone calls or commissary deposits.
- bond_info is marked no: neither the Jail Information page, the visitation page nor the commissary page gives any instruction on how to post bail.
- Iowa Code chapter 22 gives every person the right to examine and copy a public record (22.2). 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.
- Iowa has no public 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 — but neither duty produces a public number.
- 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, so state_inspection is recorded empty. That is the finding, not a gap in the search.
- Board of Supervisors — a three-member board, meeting at 900 Sixth Street, Nevada, Iowa 50201. Current membership was not confirmed from a current county page: the only board document opened here was the agenda packet of December 22, 2020, whose letterhead named Lisa K. Heddens, Linda Murken and Lauris Olson. Those are 2020 names and are not asserted as the present board.
These three offices decide who sits in a cell in Story 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