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 byBrown County Sheriff's Office
- Address15 S Washington Street, PO Box 877, New Ulm, MN 56073
- Licensed capacity56 beds, secure coed (per 7/29/2026 DOC inspection report)
- Jail administrator named in DOC reportSteve Appel
- What was triedco.brown.mn.us and browncountymn.gov (all pages tried, including /316/Sheriffs-Office, /319/Jail-information-Forms-Links, /369/Jail-Roster-PDF, /DocumentCenter/View/3382) — every attempt failed with a robots.txt fetch error (ConnectTimeout / failed to parse). The county's own site could not be opened in this session.
Source: MN DOC — Brown County Jail Inspection Report (amended), 7/29/2026 · checked 2026-09-18
The Building
You paid for it. Here is what the record says it cost.
- Year builtNot found
- Original costNot found
- Paid for byNot found
- Beds56 (licensed capacity per 7/29/2026 DOC inspection report)
Since then
- Not found
The Sheriff
Sheriff Jason Seidl
- Runs the jailYes — the elected sheriff, per Minn. Stat. 387.11 and 641.14
- TermElected, 4-year term (Minn. Stat. 382.01) — statewide rule, not confirmed for Brown County specifically
- Detention budget requested vs. approved, by year
- Jail staffing levels and vacancy rate
- Lawsuits and settlements involving the jail
Source: MN DOC — Brown County Jail Inspection Report (amended), 7/29/2026 · checked 2026-09-18
The Judges
Minnesota district judges are elected on a nonpartisan ballot to six-year terms, but most first reach the bench by gubernatorial appointment to a mid-term vacancy. Bail at first appearance is set by the court under Minn. R. Crim. P. 6.02.
Minnesota District Court (judicial district covering Brown County)
- Not found — Brown County's own site was inaccessible and no court roster for this county was opened within the search budget
- 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
- Brown County's own web presence (tried as both co.brown.mn.us and browncountymn.gov) could not be opened in this session: every fetch attempt on both domains returned a robots.txt fetch error (ConnectTimeout, or 'failed to fetch or parse robots.txt'), across multiple distinct pages and after repeated retries. Per instructions, this county's transparency checks are left as an empty object rather than scored 'no' — nobody was able to look, so no claim of non-disclosure is made.
- All facts here instead come from the Minnesota DOC's published inspection report, which is state publishing, not county publishing, and cannot satisfy any of the ten transparency checks including 'inspections'.
- Governed by the Brown County Board of Commissioners. Not independently verified — the county's own site could not be opened in this session.
These three offices decide who sits in a cell in Brown 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