Four defeats should tell county leaders something beyond the difficulty of reaching a 60% supermajority. They have not convinced enough voters that their proposals are the right solutions at an acceptable cost.
The county needs to understand why. A University of Iowa survey conducted last year suggested substantial public support for the concept of a new jail and sheriff’s office. Yet when voters were asked to approve a specific $94.5 million bond issue, just 46% supported it. That disconnect deserves serious examination.
Supervisors should commission an independent post-election survey to determine what drove voters’ decisions and what changes might make a future proposal acceptable. Was it the price, the size of the facility, concerns about incarceration policies or something else? The county should find out rather than speculate.
At the end of the day, this is a political problem to solve.
The previous jail justice center proposals, in 2012 and 2013, received 56% and 54% approval respectively. The campaign then acknowledged racial disparities, the need for diversion, and didn’t rely on a simplistic “it’s time” message (it did rely on the same, unfixed old building problems, however). It offered transparency into the decision making, and identified key programs that more space would offer.
This time around, voters were presented The Solution, leaders failed to acknowledge any tradeoffs, and the public was told we’ve done what we can for diversion. There was an unwillingness to talk about what programs might be possible with more space, or to provide data on current ones.
What changed that Supervisor Jon Green went from calling the proposal “the Taj Majail” to being a supporter? We don’t really know. When I asked, he wrote “I was wrong. A facility that meets the needs of the county is going to look significantly different than what it’s replacing,” but that’s not really an explanation.
Further, trying to argue this was about saving money, when the proposed interest payments dwarfed the expense of out-of-county incarceration, which has trended down, significantly, from its peak, and taxpayers were going to see an increase in property taxes to pay for, was a poor messaging choice.
Sheriff Brad Kunkel is a very likable person, and he stumped for the bond better than anyone, but if the county wants to get something done, they need someone from outside law enforcement who can be the face of this. And it can’t be a paid consultant who would benefit from its passage.
Further, waiting more than a decade to put something in front of voters while to saying its urgent strains credibility.
My cynical take is leaders saw the 75% support in the study they commissioned and figured they had it in the bag, even if they lost another 10 to 14 percentage points of “yes” voters. But that number had no connection to reality: cost, size, and location weren’t stated.
I campaigned against the bond, and even I said doing nothing isn’t an option. (We actually haven’t done nothing: the county invested several million into the building, unaccounted for in the Shive-Hattery report’s “do nothing” scenario.)
The answer cannot be just another survey. It’s a fine piece of data to collect, but this was a transparency and echo chamber problem. I mean, was Kunkel actually surprised it was defeated, as Trish Mahaffey reported?
Meanwhile, the County Attorney’s office has long since moved out of the court house into leased offices. Surely at least some members of the Sheriff’s Department could, too, especially since we’re told “the need to be at our physical Sheriff’s Office is getting less and less as time goes by.” So why does it have to be under one roof?
What changed between the 2013 plan, which was an expansion on site, and today, when we’ve been told it has to be this new property on the edge of town? And why won’t the University of Iowa, which has a police department who uses the jail, not contribute some real property to the cause since it won’t pay a penny more in property taxes (it pays zero)?
As the county looks ahead, it would do well to avoid stepping on the same rake. While there is pressure to come up with an answer for what’s next, moving forward without stopping to listen and build real community involvement can only result in fresh paint on the original plan.
Reconstituting the Criminal Justice Coordinating Committee, even with a slightly different makeup or name, will have the same problems.
Doing something substantially different will take more than the nine months the county has to put together a new ballot measure.
Leaders should show some patience and figure out how to do this differently instead of just rolling into The Next Thing.