Spunaugle honored for 25 years with the sheriff’s office

Montgomery County Sheriff Jon Spunaugle recently celebrated a major milestone.
The year 2025 marks Spunaugle’s 25th anniversary in serving with the Montgomery County Sheriff’s Office. Spunagule said he initially joined law enforcement on a small scale before moving to it full-time
“I actually was at a factory. I worked there for more than 10 years. During that time I was also serving as a reserve officer. Marvin Meggison hired me. Butch Rulla and Jeff Smith were deputies. They had a pretty strong reserve program, so I did that for a couple of years while I worked at the factory,” explained Spunaugle. “I was more than 10 years in at the factory, and I started wondering if that’s where I wanted to be for the rest of my life. It was a good job, but one day I just woke up and I said, I don’t want to be in a factory the rest of my life.”
Spunaugle said he talked to his wife Tracy about the situation, and when she asked him what he might prefer, Spunaugle said he really enjoyed the reserve law enforcement work.  
“I didn’t even know if there were any openings at the time, but as it turned out, there happened to be one. I went and put my application in. There were no openings at the sheriff’s office but there happened to be one opening at the Red Oak Police Department. I tested for it, and lo and behold, I got a job there. I spent about two and a half years with the ROPD. Denny Stephenson hired me, and then my chief became Steve Roberts after that. Those guys, especially Chief Roberts, gave me opportunities to expand,” commented Spunaugle. 
One of the things Spunaugle most enjoyed as part of his law enforcement career has been investigating cases dealing with narcotics.
“Chief Roberts put a lot of faith and a lot of trust in me and allowed me to do the things I like to do. As a department, we started working hand in hand with the sheriff’s office starting around 1999 and we made a lot of progress here. We investigated a ton of narcotic cases. That also was during the time we had all the meth lab problems. So there were a couple of us that went and became meth lab certified so that we could tear down these labs. It was almost like we were doing them daily. When you’re meth lab certified that means you can be cleaning up a lab that was left behind in a road ditch, or it could be part of an active narcotics case that had an active lab going, to just handling the trash left from where a meth lab used to be. We got daily calls from people and the secondary roads department reporting things they had seen.”
Spunagule spoke about the transition to the sheriff’s office, saying shortly after moving, he served under new sheriff Tony Updegrove, who retained Spunaugle on his narcotics duties. 
“It was just a passion of mine and I absolutely loved doing it. We were very active in narcotics investigations. It’s hard to even describe how active we were. I could have anywhere between seven to 10 cases rolling at one time, and everybody worked together really, really well. I think probably what really attracted me to come to the sheriff’s office was I worked closely with one of the deputies on narcotics. It also let me broaden what I could do, because then I wasn’t confined to the city, I was working in the city and the county. We actually started going into other counties and helping them, and it was a very positive experience. We were making good headwinds and getting result after result. It was definitely a positive time. It was kind of rewarding when you took the drugs off the street or you took that dealer off the street, “ Spunaugle stated.
Even after advancing further into the ranks of the sheriff’s office, Spunaugle said he was still able to maintain his favorite duties. 
“I still did a lot of the narcotics as chief deputy. When Joe got here, eight years later, I moved to chief deputy within that first year, and I was the chief deputy for about 12 years. Even then, I was doing a lot of work in narcotics. Then after Joe retired, I was elected to serve as sheriff and the time has gone really fast,” Spunaugle said.
Spunaugle felt one of the reasons there were so many issues with meth around that time was the easy access to chemicals.
“There was a lot more access to pseudoephedrine, and it was ready to build. I can remember back in the day when the grocery stores just used to store the stuff under the counter in big drawers. Then people were stealing cases of it out of grocery stores as fast as they could get them. Also, during that time, many people had a co-op, so we had a lot of anhydrous thefts from tanks that were out in a field in the middle of nowhere. That stuff was just so readily available, and there were no regulations,” Spunaugle advised. “Now when it comes to pseudoephedrine, there are regulations. You have to give your ID when you purchase it, and you’re restricted in the amount you can purchase per month. Those regulations gave us another tool, which in turn allowed us to start cracking down on those cases before it ever even got turned into the methamphetamine. That’s one of the reasons why meth labs are nil to none now. Now things are coming out of Mexico or other foreign countries.”
As times have changed, so too have the tactics Spunaugle has been learning since he started more than two decades ago.
“I would say some of the laws have changed that have made it harder for us to do our job, but as laws change, we try to change our tactics. You have to be able to keep up. I’ve said for a long time that if we stay two steps behind it, we’re keeping up because you’re never going to be right on pace with it. Prescription drug abuse is becoming a bigger issue on the broader spectrum of people as well. I’m not going to say that any of the other drug situations we deal with are worse than meth by any means. I think that’s still our drug of choice in this area and remains the most prevalent.”
Even though it’s only been 25 years with the sheriff’s office, Spunaugle said there have been a lot of changes over the years.
“Back when I started, we used to have a radio that had an antenna that was taller than I was. The technology has definitely advanced. Yeah, it’s really different. The landscape is different as well. Back then, there were a lot more bars in town. Friday and Saturday night we would encounter a lot of bar fights. As things change, as the landscape changes, that has decreased. We don’t get called to the bars to break up fights that much anymore,” commented Spunaugle.
Another drastic change he’s seen since when he started is the rise in issues pertaining to mental health.
“I can’t explain why it seems like we deal with mental health issues so much more now than we did 25 years ago, because it still had to be a problem back then. It’s a big deal to me, because of what we do. Mental health treatment and placement is starting to become the jails. This is not where these people belong, they need help,” Spunaugle explained. “We go to different conferences and meetings and this comes up a lot because other sheriffs are frustrated with it, too. They get brought here on a criminal charge when this is not the place they need to be, and our system leaves them here. We’re not mental health therapists, we’re not trained for it, but we do the best we can to take care of them the best we can.”
Making things more difficult is the closure of mental health facilities, like the one in Clarinda that was shuttered.
“There’s only a couple of facilities in the state now if you have someone that has an extreme case that they would go to. I know one of the counties next to us go to Cherokee all the time; that’s a long ways away. So far, we’ve been pretty lucky. But our transports are having to increasingly go further to find a bed. When I have two employees who have to transport clear to the east side of Iowa, that’s two people that I’m losing for an entire day. I will say I don’t like what’s being dumped on us or what’s being expected of us, and hopefully, it’ll change,” Spunaugle said.
One thing that has made things a lot easier with the recent changes is the availability of Telehealth.
“It helps because our jail staff can use it. They’ll get them on with the doctor. It’s been very beneficial, I don’t have anything bad to say about it. That’s something that has been a good thing to come along. We tried having it in the cars and that didn’t work out so well, but if we can get them in here, even if they’re not in custody and just in need, they can sit down in front of the laptop and we can get through some things,” stated Spunaugle.
Now that he’s the sheriff, Spunaugle has a lot of praise for the man who helped pave the way for him to take the reins, former Sheriff Joe Sampson, and others along the way.
“When Joe came in, he advanced me up, so I got to see a new aspect of things. I still got to do all the same things I loved to do. But I also got into the administrative side of it for 12 years, which made my transition to sheriff that much easier,” Spunaugle advised. “I would say all my all my chiefs or sheriffs gave me that opportunity to grow. When I became chief deputy, Joe let me be involved in everything. So I got to start learning from day one. When he retired and I got elected, it was it was a very easy transition, and I’ve worked with most of these guys for a long time There’s more than 120 years of service here among four of us.”
Spunaugle also offered a lot of praise to others who he works with on a daily basis that have made the last 25 years easy.
“I have really good people that I work with in dispatch, jail, the whole works. I can’t speak highly enough about them, they make my life easy,” Spunaugle said.
Now that he’s got 25 years of duty with the Montgomery County Sheriff’s Office under his belt, Spunaugle discussed some of the things he’d like to do for the future.
“I always want to try to keep advancing in something, and do something different, that Montgomery County has never seen or that it hasn’t seen for a while. For example, room and board. We’re starting to collect room and board and we’re reinforcing it. We started serving papers and doing small claims on room and board, but that didn’t go as effectively as I wanted,” Spunaugle commented. “Now we go to collections and it is working. We’re getting some of this money back. Another thing I want to keep going is housing the Polk County inmates. It’s slowed down some because they have opened up another facility, but that brings in a lot of revenue. It brought in a lot of revenue for the county. We had bed space available, so I utilized it to try to bring in some revenue. I think that first year we brought over $140,000. I’m interested in anything like that that we can do.”
Spunaugle said he’s also looking at some specialized equipment to put on the cars to prevent animal collisions.
“It’s a system that uses infrared.  It’s mounted on the car and it goes out around 450 feet for deer and animals. It shows up on a monitor so we’re not hitting animals and deer and wrecking cars. It seems like we go through a period of time every year where we encounter a lot of damage accidents from deer. Anything we can do to be proactive and help out the office advance, I’m all for it. We see something new and try it. If it works, great, we’ll keep using it. If not, we’ll try something else.”
Spunaugle said he was also pleased to be able to rewrite the standard operating procedures.
“It hadn’t been updated for years and years, so that’s a major accomplishment in law enforcement. We did one for the office and we’re doing the jail’s standard operating procedures separately. It was a lot of hard work,” Spunaugle stated.
Spunaugle said if anyone has anything they wish to discuss, the office is always open to call at 623-5107.
“I don’t like to see things on Facebook. I’d rather somebody, if they have a problem, call us directly so we can figure it out. We’ve started up our Facebook page since I’ve been here, and I think it runs pretty good, we don’t get overboard with it,” said Spunaugle.