There are a lot of different issues you can run for office on, and infinite was to prioritize them. You can talk about your top issues as a matter of fairness, a matter of justice delayed, even as a matter of reluctance but pragmatism.
Or you can simply say “we have a jail to replace” without nuance or qualification.
I’m left seeing no difference between candidates on incarceration and looking for who can at least bring a sober and collaborative leadership to the Board of Supervisors.
Another Saturday-morning special episode on the weekly Not Quite Quorum podcast. This time (partner and city councilor extraordinaire) Laura Bergus and I discuss a recent Community Conversation hosted by Great Plains Action Society about the question of a new, bigger jail.
Here in Johnson County, registered Democrats outnumber Republicans by better than 2 to 1, and the last time we elected a registered Republican to a county office was John Etheredge who won a March 2013 special election, served less than two year, and was defeated in the subsequent general election in 2014. You have to go back decades further to find another Republican, and it’s, unsurprisingly, a county sheriff.
We just don’t elect Republicans here in the People’s Republic.
Local and state Republicans have widely framed this as a lack of “rural representation,” despite seats consistently being held by Democrats who live outside of the urban core. Their solution has long been to require we elect county supervisors by districts, erroneously believing we would somehow end up with at least one fully-rural district wrapped around metro area1.
Never mind that Johnson County was always going to end up with a Coralville district, North Liberty district, two Iowa City districts and a fifth very Iowa City district. In 2025 the state legislature decided to make Johnson County, and other counties with regent universities, adopt districts and make every elected supervisor run again.
The Republicans didn’t get the impossible district they wanted, and the final districting plan was pretty much what everyone who knew the rules for map drawing expected2.
No matter. What the Republicans got was even better: Democrats in disarray total fucking chaos.
Throwing all the seats on the ballot at once takes so-called silly season to a whole new level. From my conversations, folks working for the Board of Supervisors recognize that election season makes their jobs harder, but at least usually there’s two or three supervisors who aren’t up for election to temper the disruption, and the previous all-at-large set up meant incumbents weren’t forced to run head-to-head for a seat3.
The result is that we are in one of the ugliest cycles in a while, and that’s counting the March 2025 Iowa City Council special election Oliver Weilein won over Ross Nusser.
It’s spilling over into the board room, with obvious chippiness and condensation becoming a regular feature of work sessions and formal meetings. There is a long history of bad behavior in the board room, made more apparent by the increased access to video4, but this primary cycle is a whole new level of vitriol and both veiled and direct personal attacks.
Maybe we try to recenter around facts and care?
Yours truly, on a post-coffee-on-a-Saturday-morning special episode on the weekly Not Quite Quorum podcast, where (partner and city councilor extraordinaire) Laura Bergus discuss the happenings of the past week around Johnson County’s (in)decision to push for a new jail:
I’ve said before that there is a single litmus test in local politics.
I feel like this is where the line is drawn: are you willing to go along with the status quo of our carceral system or not? And I think there is an unwillingness or lack of interest in understanding why people might question the status quo.
Listen wherever you get your podcasts.
Before last year’s City Council elections, County Attorney Rachel Zimmermann Smith published an op ed that she recently republished on her re-election social media account looking ahead to the June 2 primary:
Before casting your vote, please consider whether a candidate has ever called for defunding or abolishing the police or for policies that do under the guise of something else. Ask them if they plan to freeze police department spending and what role they believe law enforcement should have in keeping our communities safe. Ask them if they support our Community Violence Intervention Program,which has already made our community safer from gun violence. And, finally, if they understate our officers’ and deputies’ role in protecting people from harm, ask them the last time they went for a ride-along or had a meaningful conversation with the officers they seek to oversee.
Let’s recast this, shall we?
Before casting your vote, please consider whether a candidate has ever called for defending the status quo of our carceral punishment system. Ask them if they plan for police accountability and what role they believe prevention and diversion should have in keeping our communities safe. Ask them if they support factually supported interventions with trackable metrics. And, finally, if they question non-law enforcement community safety interventions’ role in protecting people from harm, ask them the last time they spent time in a marginalized community or had a meaningful conversation with the incarcerated people they seek to oversee.
Yours truly, as a pre-coffee-on-a-Saturday-morning fill-in on the weekly Not Quite Quorum podcast, where (partner and city councilor extraordinaire) Laura Bergus and I talked about the direct line from chattel slavery to disparities in policing and incarceration, the Johnson County Jail, and our hopes for a better future:
There’s a sense in city planning. It’s important because you don’t unbuild roads. Once you build a road, it’s there.
And so you gotta really have to get it right, even if it takes 20, 30 years between when you plan that road and the road gets built.
A jail, and particularly this one, this iteration, is something we’re talking about lasting a long time.
We’ve heard supervisors say 100 years. [Supervisor] Jon [Green] has said 50 years. [Sheriff] Brad [Kunkel] has said that this should last us 30 years before it needs something. Whatever that is, we’re still talking about building a thing in our community, a unique thing in our community.
Real hard to convert that building to something else. And we need to have a conversation around it. And we haven’t for more than a decade.
Listen wherever you get your podcasts.
Two stories, posted back to back, by The Gazette today.
First, from Linn County:
A judge found a Marion father, who strangled his 5-year-old son in October 2024, not guilty by reason of insanity. He will serve no prison term.
Matthew Gerald Schleier, 46, was charged with first-degree murder for killing his son, Jack, on Oct. 29, 2024, in the family’s Marion home. Schleier claimed he was insane at the time and three experts who testified during his February trial said he was in a psychosis and couldn’t distinguish right from wrong.
This is the first time in at least 25 years, a judge or jury in Linn County has found a defendant not guilty by reason of insanity.
Then from Johnson County:
A former University of Iowa freshman who attacked and tried to kill a woman walking home from work on campus late one April night four years ago was sentenced Monday to 50 years in prison — nearly double the sentence his attorney requested.
“Relieved,” was how the victim described her feelings after leaving Ali Younes’ sentencing in the Johnson County Courthouse.
Younes, now 22, was living in the university’s Burge Residence Hall on April 25, 2022, when while walking late at night he saw a woman walking across the Iowa Memorial Union footbridge wearing expensive earrings, according to police records. They initially were headed in opposite directions, but Younes turned around and began following the woman — attacking her just after 10 p.m. near the Art Building West, where he tried to kill her with his bare hands.
The courtroom photos of Schleier show a well-dressed white man with a serious, remorseful look on his face, while those of Younes show a young Arab man, in a bright orange correctional system jumpsuit, with an slight smile.
The narratives here are pretty disparate.
KCRG, reporting on the Johnson County Board of Supervisors work session about a new jail, replacing the current facility and its 65-bed “functional” capacity:
Both plans include a 120-bed jail with 20 additional overflow beds. The plans note that capacity could be expanded to 240 beds.
I ask again: how many beds is 120 beds?
Update
I called four of the five Johnson County Supervisors. I got responses from three.
Supervisor Remington thanked me for the call, said this was different that she understood, that she did not support a capacity of 240, and would seek clarification and consensus at the work session.
Supervisor Green, via text:
Nick, happy to give you a call but the current proposal is for 120 beds with room (not overflow, but room) to add 20 down the road. The mechanical systems will be engineered to support 100 down the road, but that would require another referendum. It isn’t something a future board could do without the public weighing in.
Supervisor Sullivan, via voicemail:
Rebecca Solnit in a crackjack essay in her Meditations in an Emergency newsletter:
False certainty is dangerous; it rules out all possibilities but one and in essence surrenders to that imagined future. I remember people dismissively telling me that the 2016 joke candidate Donald Trump could never be elected, while they took Hillary Clinton’s 85% chance of winning as pretty much the same as 100%, as if the likely was the inevitable, the unlikely the impossible. We’ve been living in the unlikely ever since (that a sundowning clown who is also the most powerful man in the world threatened the people of Iran with war crimes while standing next to a fretful life-size Easter Bunny would once have been unbelievable, but here we are). There is a lot of space between inevitable and impossible, and that is the space of the possible, good and bad.
This case for defiance has it all: Terminator 2, ICE, the Pentagon Papers, hope, and the amazing parenthetical quoted above.
I appreciate the reframing of “hope” from “optimism” to “never fucking surrender.”
Every year since 2015, the Johnson County Board of Supervisors sets a minimum wage. Since 2017, that act is a symbolic recommendation after the State of Iowa prohibited local authorities from having a wage higher than the states.
In 2026, the Board of Supervisors set the minimum to $13.37, or $27,809.60 before taxes for someone working full time.
According to Common Good Iowa, a single person without children in Johnson County would need to gross $32,658, or $15.70 an hour, to make ends meet.
If we’re going to take this symbolic action, shouldn’t it at least meet this threshold of livability? It seems it isn’t perhaps the symbol we would hope it to be.
