The Detention Center
Not scored. The county's own website was not reachable in the session that produced this record, so its disclosures were never examined. This is a gap in the research, not a finding about the county.
- Operated byTrego County Sheriff's Office
- Capacity9 beds total — 6 male, 3 female (per Kansas Sheriffs' Association profile, re-confirmed this session)
- Boarding rates$45.00/day general and $45.00/day out-of-county inmate rate (per Kansas Sheriffs' Association profile, re-confirmed this session)
- BudgetNot published on the Kansas Sheriffs' Association's Trego County profile
- County's real official website — confirmed but unreachablehttps://www.tregocountyks.com/ — this matches portal.kansas.gov's listing (no URL trap here). A domain search found real pages, including a Sheriff page (/2238/Sheriff), a Jail staff directory (/Directory.aspx?did=52), a Boards page (/2301/Boards) and a Minutes page (/2307/Minutes), but every one of them failed to load this session (see 'What was tried') so none of their content could be verified.
- What was triedWebSearch (allowed_domains: tregocountyks.com) returned https://www.tregocountyks.com/2238/Sheriff, /Directory.aspx?did=52, /directory.aspx, /2301/Boards, /2307/Minutes and others. WebFetch was attempted on /2238/Sheriff (twice), /2301/Boards (twice), /2307/Minutes, and /directory.aspx — all failed with a robots.txt fetch error from the tool, so none of these pages were actually opened. No curl/wget workaround was used, per the absolute rule.
- Retry session (2026-09-17)A fresh WebSearch (allowed_domains: tregocountyks.com) again surfaced /2238/Sheriff, the Jail staff directory (/Directory.aspx?did=52), /2301/Boards, and /2307/Minutes. WebFetch was retried on /2238/Sheriff (robots.txt fetch failed: ConnectTimeout) and /Directory.aspx?did=52 (robots.txt fetch failed to parse). Both failed again this session, identically to the prior attempt. No curl/wget workaround was used.
Source: Kansas Sheriffs' Association — county profile (Trego County) · checked 2026-09-17
The Building
You paid for it. Here is what the record says it cost.
- Year builtNot found
- Original costNot found
- Paid for byNot found
- Beds9 (6 male, 3 female)
Since then
- Not found
The Sheriff
Sheriff Ed Pritchard
- TitleTrego County Sheriff
- Office address525 Warren, WaKeeney, KS 67672
- Phone / jail admin / fax(785) 743-5721 office / (785) 743-5722 jail admin / 785-743-6474 fax
- Staffing (per Kansas Sheriffs' Association profile, re-confirmed this session)3 sworn personnel, 2 jail staff
- Statutory jailerK.S.A. 19-811 makes the elected sheriff charge and custody of the county jail and all prisoners in it
- Detention budget requested vs. approved, by year
- Jail staffing levels and vacancy rate
- Lawsuits and settlements involving the jail
Source: Kansas Sheriffs' Association — county profile (Trego County) · checked 2026-09-17
The Judges
Kansas decides judicial selection district by district under Kan. Const. Art. 3 §6 and K.S.A. 20-2901. In most rural Kansas counties the district magistrate judge sets bail (K.S.A. 20-302b). The 23rd Judicial District elects its district judges on a partisan ballot - the default under Kan. Const. Art. 3 sec. 6. Its voters have not adopted the nonpartisan nominating-commission method available under K.S.A. 20-2901.
23rd Judicial District — District Court
- 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 2026-09-17
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
- Not scored. Trego County's own website (tregocountyks.com) was located and its jail/sheriff/boards page URLs identified via search, but every attempt to open those pages this session failed with a robots.txt fetch error from the tool — the site's actual disclosures were never examined. This is a gap in the research (a tool/access limitation this session), not a finding about the county.
- Retry pass (2026-09-17): tried again via a fresh domain-scoped WebSearch and two more WebFetch attempts (Sheriff page, Jail staff directory) — both failed again with robots.txt errors. Still unreachable this session; audit.checks remains {} rather than ten invented "no" entries.
- The Kansas Sheriffs' Association is a private association, not the county publishing on its own site, so its profile page cannot satisfy a transparency check regardless of what it discloses. portal.kansas.gov is a state directory and likewise cannot satisfy a transparency check.
- State-layer finding: K.S.A. 75-5228, the 1973 Kansas jail inspection statute, was repealed effective April 11, 1996; its companion 75-5227 followed July 1, 1996. Nothing replaced it. The Kansas Department of Corrections runs no county-jail inspection program.
- Not found — Trego County's own Boards and Minutes pages were located (tregocountyks.com/2301/Boards, /2307/Minutes) but could not be opened this session (robots.txt fetch errors on every attempt). K.S.A. 19-201 requires each Kansas county to have three, five, or seven commissioner districts.
These three offices decide who sits in a cell in Trego 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 2026-09-17 · dollars and outcomes still being gathered