Nick Bergus

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.

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?

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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:

The conversation by the board is available online.

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.

Cartographer William Rankin, author of Radical Cartography, in an interview with Mike Higgins of Chatham House:

We do not live in a jigsaw-puzzle world, even in the straightforward sense of what sovereignty currently means. In the US context, consider American Indian reservations: tribal sovereignty is taken seriously by both Indigenous peoples and the federal government, yet the Supreme Court has long held that Congress retains ultimate authority over those sovereign nations. State boundaries sometimes run straight through reservations. These are places not subject to state jurisdiction, yet they sit inside states. Showing the contradictions of actual sovereignty as it exists is important. 

There’s another level too. Even within territories where a state makes a uniform claim to sovereignty – within the US or anywhere else – the territory is not homogeneous. There are vast differences in population, resources, climate and the practical reach of state power. Cartography ought to be helping us think about those realities, rather than simply presenting the international system as an abstract arrangement of autonomous jigsaw pieces. 

Maps are political and borders are made up.

The Iowa City subreddit feels pretty left leaning most of the time, so the anti-local taxing-authority comments in this thread about Iowa City Community School District taxes is telling.

In short: the propaganda works.

Victor Tangermann in Futurism:

Now, three years after its AI pivot, the writing is on the wall. The company reported a net loss of $57.3 million in 2025 in an earnings report released on Thursday. In an official statement, the company glumly hinted at the possibility of going under sooner rather than later, writing that “there is substantial doubt about the Company’s ability to continue as a going concern.”

A cautionary tale.

BuzzFeed News won a Pulitzer for reporting about China’s mass detention of Muslims in 2021.