Lauren Whitehead serves on the Solon City Council.
Earlier this month I toured the Johnson County Sheriff’s Office and Johnson County Jail. In 2026, voters will likely decide on a bond to replace this failing facility, which serves all of Johnson County—including my city of Solon (population 3,000), about ten miles north of Iowa City. I’ve served for eight years as a city councilor and two as mayor pro tem.
What I saw during that visit was disturbing—but what concerns me even more is the growing pattern of political resistance to public safety infrastructure as a whole on the Board of Supervisors. This essay is both a fuller account of what I saw at the jail and a broader commentary on the challenges facing law enforcement, infrastructure, and rural governance in Johnson County today.
FEET AND FECES
I went into my tour expecting the jail to look run down, like an old school building with aging pipes and HVAC issues. I knew it was crowded and expected to see evidence of that. Mostly, I thought it would be a tour of a facility that’s just too expensive to run as-is—and that’s why we need a new jail…