Dodge County detainees to be housed in Olmsted County Adult Detention Center

(ABC 6 News) – The Olmsted County Board of Commissioners held a packed meeting Tuesday afternoon, where they approved a resolution allowing people arrested in Dodge County to be held in the Olmsted County Adult Detention Center.

Dodge County doesn’t have its own full-scale detention center. Detainees usually get sent to neighboring Steele County for holding, but the Steele County center is under construction.

Olmsted County Sheriff Kevin Torgerson said this, and the fact that detainees from Dodge County get their medical care in Olmsted County means it just made sense to move the detainees here.

He also said there will not be much of a cost to Olmsted.

"Their numbers are not really a challenge to us at all. They are not able to house all of their detainees, not that there’s that many, but they’re running through that challenge right now in Steele County," Torgerson said.

The Sheriff says this vote by the Board of Commissioners will add 10 to 15 more detainees a day.

However, the county will not be adding any more staff to the jail, and they do not anticipate running out of space. The approved contract is annual, and the Board can re-examine their decision at the end of next year.

Also at the meeting Tuesday, a crowd of approximately two to three dozen people gathered to ask the Board to take a second look at last week’s primary election results.

Those that spoke in the public comment portion of the meeting believed, based on their own, personal analysis that ballots were miscounted. They did not provide any evidence of fraudulent votes in the meeting.

The group also, two years later, asked the Board to re-examine the 2020 presidential election results for Olmsted County.