How this headline may connect to industries in Iowa. Technical scores are below — click any ? for what a metric means.
Johnson County sheriff and supervisor clash over jail project costs
IowaGDELTGDELT event3% biasedFri, May 22, 2026, 12:00 AM
1 of 30 sentences classified as biased · Model: roberta-anno-lexical-ft-v1
Johnson County sheriff and supervisor clash over jail project costs.Johnson County sheriff and supervisor clash over jail project costs IOWA CITY, Iowa (KCRG) - A Johnson County sheriff and a county supervisor are at odds over how much the new county jail would cost.Sheriff Brad Kunkel called out Supervisor V Fixmer-Oraiz at a board meeting Thursday about information published about the jail in a magazine article.Fixmer-Oraiz’s opinion piece, published in Little Village Magazine, criticized the process the county has taken to design a new jail.They called out the jail’s price tag and number of beds.Kunkel confronted Fixmer-Oraiz at Thursday’s supervisor meeting, saying the article was filled with misinformation.“The misinformation is frustrating,” Kunkel said.Kunkel spoke during public comment, pushing back on the article Fixmer-Oraiz wrote.He said they wrongly framed the cost of the jail as $90 million.“The jail component of it is about 50% of that.So to say a $90 million facility and have that focused on the jail is not accurate.The jail is only about half of our operation.The rest of our operation is patrol, civil, everything else that we do,” Kunkel said.The jail project includes a new headquarters for the Johnson County Sheriff’s Office, a department with about 100 deputies and other staff.Fixmer-Oraiz said the numbers still don’t add up.“So now we’re spending $45 million on a jail and $45 million on office space.So we should have a better understanding as to what that is,” Fixmer-Oraiz said.Capacity concerns The current jail can’t manage the region’s capacity.Johnson County has to send one out of every three inmates to a jail outside the county.That can cost as much as $40,000 a month.That doesn’t include the taxpayer cost to transport the inmates.Kunkel and Fixmer-Oraiz don’t agree on how many beds a new jail would have.“We have never been talking about opening the doors with 240 beds.The entire time, the recommendation was 140 beds and the jail size so that it could be expanded in the future if necessary,” Kunkel said.Fixmer-Oraiz said that isn’t what was presented to the supervisors.“It’s really interesting to me that he keeps denying that 240 beds was ever considered.He literally paid a professional designer to create something that then was presented to us that included 240 beds,” Fixmer-Oraiz said.The one thing both county leaders agree on is the current jail isn’t working.Copyright 2026 KCRG.All rights reserved.