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 byGrundy County Sheriff's Office (by operation of RSMo 221.020)
- Jail nameNot found
- What was triedhttps://grundycountymo.com/wordpress/sheriffs-office/ was reached twice but returned only a non-emergency phone number (660 359 2828), two app-store image links and a mailing-list prompt - the page body did not render to automated retrieval, so no jail content could be read either way
Source: · 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
- BedsNot found
Since then
- Not found
The Sheriff
Sheriff Rodney Herring
- Runs the jailRSMo 221.020 gives the sheriff of each Missouri county custody and charge of the county jail; Grundy County is not one of the three statutory exceptions
- How the office is filledElected countywide on a partisan ballot
- Sheriff's office address610 Main Street, Trenton 64683
- Source caveatConfirmed from the state's County Sheriff's Offices contact dataset on data.mo.gov; the county's own Sheriff's Office page returned no readable text
- Detention budget requested vs. approved, by year
- Jail staffing levels and vacancy rate
- Lawsuits and settlements involving the jail
Source: Missouri Open Data - County Sheriff's Offices Based on Missouri Law Enforcement Agencies (data.mo.gov, dated 09/18/2026) · checked 2026-09-18
The Judges
Grundy County is not one of the six Missouri jurisdictions where the 1940 Missouri Nonpartisan Court Plan reaches the trial bench, so its circuit and associate circuit judges are elected on a partisan ballot. They are state judicial officers, not county officials. No judge could be confirmed from a page opened in this session, so none is named.
Circuit Court and Associate Circuit Court serving Grundy County
- 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
Notes on the record
- Grundy County was NOT examined and must not be scored as a closed county. audit.checks is deliberately left as an empty object. The county's Sheriff's Office page was reached but its content did not render to automated retrieval - only a non-emergency phone number and two app-store images came back - so it is not possible to say whether the county names its jail, publishes a roster, or publishes anything else.
- What was tried: https://grundycountymo.com/wordpress/sheriffs-office/ (reached twice, no readable body); https://www.mocounties.com/grundy-county (fetch failed, robots.txt connect timeout).
- The only fact established is the sheriff's name and office address, from the state's own law-enforcement agency contact dataset on data.mo.gov, not from the county.
- No Missouri state agency inspects county jails. The Department of Corrections inspects state prisons under RSMo chapter 217; that authority does not reach chapter 221 county jails. The only statutory mechanisms are local and lay - a grand jury visit under RSMo 221.300, and a county board of visitors under RSMo 221.320-221.350, which RSMo 221.350 requires to report yearly to the county.
- Missouri has no death-in-custody reporting law and no public statewide dataset; RSMo 58.451(1)(5) requires only that the coroner be notified of a death from injury or illness in custody.
- Under the Sunshine Law, RSMo 610.023, a records request must be acted upon as soon as possible and no later than the end of the third business day after receipt.
- Grundy County is governed by a three-member County Commission (presiding commissioner and two associate commissioners) in the ordinary Missouri form. No commissioner name, board page or minutes page could be confirmed - the county's site did not render to automated retrieval.
These three offices decide who sits in a cell in Grundy 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