The operative who crossed the river

WHITEHALL — The board had left him a door.

The censure resolution on the table July 20 stated its own purpose: “to formally express the Trempealeau County Board's disapproval of the conduct described above and to encourage future professional conduct.” It did not remove Parrish from office. It did not restrict his vote. Vice Chair Kevin Whalen put the point as advice: “I believe Andy Parrish's best work as supervisor is coming. He has the passion. He has the capability. But he just needs to know what lane he needs to be in for our meetings.” The way out of the moment was a word of regret.

Parrish did not offer one.

“Do I regret what I did? No,” he told the board. “And I will do it again to this body. I guarantee it. The Constitution is real. People's rights matter. Protecting speech, even speech you hate the most, matters.”

Fifteen supervisors voted to censure him. One voted no. One, according to the Trempealeau County Times, did not vote at all; WKBT reported the tally as 15-1. Either way it took a few minutes, and it left a first-year supervisor from District 2 at the center of the loudest argument this county has had in years.

It also put on the board's own record the plainest statement Parrish has made of what he says this fight is about.

The résumé nobody expected in District 2

Parrish is not from here. He is a Minnesota political operative by trade, and he spent roughly two decades in the part of politics most voters never see: the staff side, where campaigns are actually built.

He went to work for Michele Bachmann in early 2005, two years before she reached Congress — MinnPost reported in 2012 that he “didn't quite reach his seven-year anniversary” on her staff, an anniversary that would have fallen on Valentine's Day — and rose to become her congressional chief of staff. He managed her three successful congressional campaigns. In June 2011 he stepped away from the chief-of-staff job and moved to Iowa to build her presidential caucus operation; her office told Roll Call at the time he was taking “a temporary leave” from the post. On Aug. 13, 2011, Bachmann won the Ames Straw Poll with 4,823 of 16,892 votes cast — 152 more than Ron Paul. MinnPost, writing about him the following year, described him as the man who managed “her surprise win at the Iowa straw poll.”

He returned to the Washington office that October and was dismissed in February 2012, days short of the seven years. He expressed no grudge at the time. “I still consider her a close personal friend,” he told MinnPost.

The years that followed read like a working operative's ledger. He was deputy campaign manager of Minnesota for Marriage, the 2012 campaign for a state constitutional amendment defining marriage. That September he registered A Stronger Minnesota, a Republican independent-expenditure fund, with state campaign finance regulators. He managed Julianne Ortman's 2014 U.S. Senate campaign. He later served as director of public relations for LifeSiteNews, the anti-abortion news site.

Then he stopped being a Minnesota story. He and his family moved across the river into Trempealeau County. He began writing conservative opinion columns carried by WIZM in La Crosse and publishing video commentary under his own name. A biography he supplied to the Pioneer describes his current paid work as fundraising and communications for nonprofits.

And he started reading minutes.

The claim, then the seat

The sequence is easy to tell backward. The record tells it in one direction.

In January 2026, Andy Parrish filed a notice of claim against Trempealeau County. He was not a supervisor. He was a resident with no title and no vote, alleging the county's Flock Safety license-plate cameras had been installed without County Board approval. A notice of claim is not a lawsuit; under Wis. Stat. § 893.80 it is the paperwork you must file before you are allowed to bring one. Parrish's own website puts it in stronger terms — “I've sued over it,” the homepage says. The record the Pioneer has reviewed shows the notice of claim, the required precursor to a suit, and no court filing — and no record of what became of the claim.

Three months later, on April 7, he was elected to the County Board from District 2, replacing Stacey Klein. He was seated in April and assigned to four bodies within days — Environment and Land Use, Parks and Tourism, the ADRC board, and the Law Enforcement and Emergency Management Committee. The last one had the cameras on its agenda.

Parrish filed paperwork, then ran for the seat that would let him ask the question from inside the room. Nothing in the minutes the Pioneer has reviewed records any discussion of whether the claim required him to step back from camera items once he arrived, and the Pioneer has found no public statement from him addressing it.

What the records show

The documents this paper has published — county emails, the signed contract, invoices and committee minutes, obtained under Wisconsin's public records law — lay out the purchase.

On July 29, 2024, then-Sheriff Brett Semingson emailed a Flock Safety salesman to book a meeting. The meeting came on the afternoon of Aug. 15, 2024; at 4:31 p.m., Semingson emailed the county finance office: “Please add $12,750 to the investigator line for 2025 budget. This would be for the purchase and installation of three Flock cameras.” The next morning the salesman sent the pricing: $3,000 per camera per year, plus a one-time installation fee running from $150 to $1,250 depending on the pole.

The Law Enforcement Committee's minutes for Sept. 11, 2024, list a discussion item — “Possible Purchase Flock Cameras 2025 Budget” — and record no motion and no vote. The county board adopted the 2025 budget on Nov. 12, 2024, with the camera money inside the sheriff's request. On Nov. 13 Semingson emailed the county administrator: “I just want to hear it from you before I move ahead with my Flock Camera project.” On Nov. 15, 2024, he signed the agreement — three cameras, $11,650 for the first year, $20,650 over the deal, on a 24-month term with a 24-month renewal and a 30-day data-retention setting. The cameras went live in early April 2025. In August 2025 the chief deputy told Flock the office had put three more cameras into its 2026 budget proposal.

In the records the county has released — running from that first sales email in July 2024 into the fall of 2025 — there is no vote by any elected body on whether Trempealeau County should have automatic license-plate readers as such.

The county's answer is on the record, and it is not silence. Board Chair Andy Todd told WXOW on July 22 that the funding vote was the vote, and that the rest belongs to a separately elected constitutional officer: “The board cannot do anything under the constitution, it's all about the sheriff. So one, they've been approved when it comes to funding. So, that's been done, that was done two years ago. It's up to the sheriff, if that sheriff wants to take them down right now, if that sheriff wants to do an investigation.”

It is a serious argument, and it describes how counties buy many things: squad cars, radios and body cameras routinely come out of board-approved budget lines without a second, item-specific vote. Parrish's counter is that a searchable log of every vehicle on a county highway is not a squad car, and that the board's power over the money is exactly the lever that makes the question the board's. Neither position has been tested in court. Todd told WXOW the contract expires Dec. 31. The signed agreement says otherwise: its 24-month term began “upon first installation and validation,” and on April 9, 2025 — the day the first two cameras were validated — Flock put the resulting dates in writing to the sheriff's office. The term runs to April 8, 2027, renewing itself for another two years unless someone gives notice about thirty days before that. The Pioneer has since set out what that means for the three candidates.

May 13, and the report

Parrish made his case to the Law Enforcement Committee on May 13. The minutes are four lines: “Flock Cameras – Andy Parrish presented on Flock Safety Process,” and then, “Parrish rescinded his resolution at this time.”

The claims he made that day prompted an investigation by Corporation Counsel Susan Fisher, whose office delivered a signed investigative summary on June 9. Its findings, in its own words: “no wrongdoing or significant errors in process were discovered,” and “multiple statements made within the presentation were clearly incorrect.” There was, the summary said, “no evidence of any law broken, an attempt to hide anything, any money spent without the necessary authority, or of any other legal wrongdoing.”

Two of Parrish's May 13 claims did not survive it. He told the committee there were no written agreements related to the cameras; there is a signed contract, dated Nov. 15, 2024, and this newspaper has published it. He told them the sheriff lacked authority to purchase the system; the summary found the money was spent with the necessary authority, inside an appropriation the board itself passed.

He was wrong about both, in public, and the county's lawyer said so in writing.

Do I regret what I did? No. And I will do it again to this body. I guarantee it.

Supervisor Andy Parrish, on the censure floor, July 20

What the report did not resolve is the argument that has run through this county all summer: not whether the process was legal, but whether it was enough. The summary answered the first question. The second one is a policy judgment, and it belongs to the board and to the voters.

July 8

On July 8 the Law Enforcement Committee took up the cameras again, with Sheriff Erica Koxlien presenting an informational session; the committee heard a Flock Safety presentation first, as the Pioneer has reported. Parrish came with more, including the number that has trailed the debate since: that more than 5,000 outside organizations and agencies had accessed Trempealeau County's camera network in a single month.

That figure needs a caution attached. It is Parrish's characterization of Flock's own records, delivered orally at a committee meeting. The county has not released the underlying audit log, Parrish has not published it, and “accessed” could mean agencies that ran searches touching this county's cameras or agencies with standing access through a network-sharing setting — a distinction that changes the meaning considerably. The Pioneer has requested the log. Until it is public, the number is Parrish's, not the county's and not this paper's.

Parrish's own agenda item never got its turn. Supervisor Scott Leonard — a former police officer, as the Pioneer has reported — moved to lay the matter on the table indefinitely, and the motion carried 4-1, with Parrish the lone no; the sequence is on the meeting video.

So the vendor was heard. The supervisor who had spent months researching the vendor was not.

Accounts of the next few minutes differ in emphasis. Tonya Rebhahn, a county resident who has spoken publicly against the cameras and was in the room, wrote afterward: “Scott Leonard interrupts him. Board members didn't seem to care when Andy got interrupted. There was double standards there.” The Trempealeau County Times reported that the outburst came after Leonard called on the committee chair to restore order.

What no account disputes is what Parrish said next: he told Leonard to f— off. He repeated it himself in a Facebook post that day, quoted by WKBT.

It was two words he did not need to say, in a room where they were guaranteed to become the story instead of the cameras. That is precisely what happened. A motion to recess followed; as the Pioneer has reported, the released security footage shows it was never seconded and never voted on, and the room emptied anyway. That question — like the audit log — is the subject of a pending records request.

But it is worth reading what the censure did with those two words. Resolution 2026-07-05 made four accusations: profanity directed at a fellow supervisor, disruptive behavior at official meetings, use of personal electronic devices during meetings, and repeated absences from assigned committee meetings. The document's own footer lists it as drafted by the county board chair and introduced by the Executive and Finance Committee.

The Pioneer checked each charge against the meeting recordings, the minutes and the security footage released under the open records law. The profanity charge holds up without qualification; it is on video, and Parrish owned it on the censure floor. The disruption charge names no meeting other than July 8 and cites no other date. The attendance charge attaches no attendance record, no dates and no comparison to any other supervisor — Parrish had been seated for roughly three months. And the phone charge rests on § 2.04(2) of the county code, which tells all 17 supervisors to keep phones silent and not to text without the chair's approval; WTCO's recordings of board and committee meetings show supervisors using phones in that room as a matter of course, and the Pioneer found no other supervisor named in a resolution under that provision.

One of the four is documented without qualification. The other three, as printed, arrive with no dates, no records and no comparisons.

Todd, for his part, has said publicly the censure was about conduct, not cameras. “We all need to be treated fairly. We all have our disagreements. There's no reason why we can't talk about it,” he told WKBT after the vote, adding that he hoped the censure sent a message: “We can talk, we can communicate, we can do it respectfully and we can get the job done.”

What he built instead

If the tabling motion was meant to end the discussion, it did not.

On July 3, Parrish launched andyparrish.org: a free daily 6 a.m. briefing he says is built on more than 700 Wisconsin government sources, plus a Flock Toolkit that walks any resident through Wisconsin's public records law — Wis. Stat. §§ 19.31–19.39, statute citations included — and assembles a request in about two minutes. The toolkit is unusually practical for an advocacy site: it explains, in plain English, that any person can request records without giving a reason, that agencies cannot bill for redaction time, that records cannot be destroyed for at least 60 days after a denial, and that a resident who wins a wrongful-denial suit can recover fees, costs and damages.

The site maps what it counts as more than 1,600 known plate readers across Wisconsin and the upper Midwest and lets a user drop two pins to see how many cameras would photograph the car in between. It carries a model ordinance he calls the FREE Act: no surveillance technology without elected-board approval, a published use policy, audit logging and hard retention limits. As of July 29, the site's petition for it showed two signatures toward a goal of 500. It is early.

“Transparency isn't optional,” the site says. “Liberty isn't negotiable.”

He has company statewide. A Wisconsin Examiner analysis published Aug. 6, 2025, covering five months of Flock audit data from January through May of that year, found searches by at least 221 Wisconsin law enforcement agencies. In the year since, the Examiner has reported, Dane County, Verona, Monona, Fitchburg, Appleton, Oshkosh and Sturgeon Bay have moved to drop their Flock contracts. Three Wisconsin officers — two in Milwaukee, one in Menasha — have been criminally charged over personal use of plate-reader data. One, Milwaukee Officer Josue Ayala, has pleaded guilty; the two other cases were pending as of late July, and charges are not convictions.

In Oshkosh, the reversal took a day. At a council meeting in April, Flock representatives said the system did not create heat maps of a vehicle's movements. The next evening Police Chief Dean Smith told a special session that his own staff had shown him otherwise; citing the “misrepresentation,” he told the council, “I can no longer recommend Flock,” and members rescinded, unanimously, the renewal they had approved 5-2 the night before. Flock said in a statement that its representative had understood the question to be about whether people can be tracked, “to which the answer is categorically ‘no,’” and that the system's map view shows only where images of a vehicle were captured within its 30-day retention window.

Wisconsin has no statute specifically governing automated license-plate readers. Assembly Bill 576, which would have required a warrant to search plate-reader data, died in committee when the 2025-26 session ended in March.

The argument Parrish brought to a committee room in Whitehall in May is the same argument being had in council chambers from Sturgeon Bay to Fitchburg — and in most of those rooms, as in this one, it is being had after the cameras are already up.

What it moved

Flock does not come up in the April announcement coverage of the sheriff's race the Pioneer has reviewed. It comes up now, at nearly every stop.

That is the measurable thing. Three Republicans are on the Aug. 11 ballot — Sheriff Erica Koxlien, Chief Deputy Wayne Dahl and Blair Police Chief Kent Johnson — and each of them has been asked this summer what should happen to the cameras when the contract comes due. Their answers are their own; the Pioneer has reported them separately and will keep doing so through the primary.

For a stretch of this summer, there was a fourth name in the conversation, and it was his.

The Pioneer has confirmed that Parrish weighed a Libertarian write-in campaign for sheriff — not out of ambition for the office, but because with no Democrat in the race the August primary would settle it, and November would offer voters no choice at all on the one question the county had spent the summer arguing about.

The mechanism is real, and narrower than most people realize. Wisconsin lets a write-in candidate win a party's nomination at the partisan primary — and with it a line on the November ballot — by drawing votes equal to the number of nomination-paper signatures the office would otherwise require. For county office in a county of Trempealeau's size, that number is 200. Two hundred people writing his name into the Libertarian column on Aug. 11 would have put Andy Parrish on the general election ballot in November without a single signature collected.

Two hundred is a small number and a hard one. Volunteers working with him researched the requirement and began sounding out whether the support was there. Because pledges do not convert one-for-one into ballots actually cast, the working target was closer to 500 commitments — inside a few weeks, in the middle of summer, for a man who had held elected office for four months.

He did not file. Johnson committed to taking the cameras down, and Parrish backed him instead — which got the question onto the November ballot without Parrish's name on it, the outcome he had wanted in the first place. That endorsement is disclosed in the editor's note with this story; the Pioneer has endorsed no one.

What belongs in a story about Andy Parrish is narrower than a horse race. In April, a county could buy a surveillance network on a budget line and nobody would think to ask a candidate for sheriff about it. By August, in this county, nobody can avoid the question — and the man who put it there was briefly willing to run for an office he did not want in order to keep it there.

The lane

Kevin Whalen's line about lanes came wrapped in praise — “I believe Andy Parrish's best work as supervisor is coming” — and there is a version of the next two years in which Parrish takes the advice, learns the room and gets more done than he has so far.

But the record of the past seven months is that the lane kept narrowing. He filed a claim as a private citizen; the county's lawyer later found the purchase legal. He brought a resolution in May and withdrew it himself. He brought research in July and watched his item tabled before he could present it. Two words at the end of that sequence got him censured — and turned a committee-room argument about a $20,650 contract into a countywide argument about who decides what the government knows about where you drive.

None of that makes the words right, and Parrish has been wrong about specifics in this fight in ways the county's own lawyer documented. The board that censured him has a defensible reading of Wisconsin law behind its position and a corporation counsel's report to point to.

What remains, after all of it, is a question the county has not answered and will have to: whether a searchable log of where the residents of this county drive should have required a vote of the people they elect, and whether it will require one the next time.

The primary is Aug. 11. The county board meets again Aug. 17. The contract runs to April 8, 2027, and the notice that would end it falls due around March 9 — about ten weeks after the next sheriff is sworn in. Somebody will inherit a signature nobody separately voted on, and will have to decide what to do about it in their first weeks in the job. This time everyone will be watching.

Verify it yourself

Flock Safety agreement, signed Nov. 15, 2024, and the sheriff's office email file, July 2024–Sept. 2025 — CivicIntel Open Records reader.

Trempealeau County Board agenda packet, July 20, 2026, including Resolution 2026-07-05.

“Signed Investigative Summary,” Corporation Counsel Susan Fisher, June 9, 2026 — published by WXOW with its July 22 story; the Pioneer holds a copy.

Law Enforcement and Emergency Management Committee minutes, Sept. 11, 2024, and May 13, 2026.

Trempealeau County Code § 2.04(2); Wis. Stat. §§ 19.31–19.39 and 893.80.

Wisconsin Examiner, “Analysis of Flock use by Wisconsin cops reveals trends, raises questions,” Aug. 6, 2025, and “Flock on shaky ground in Wisconsin as communities weigh privacy and safety,” June 4, 2026.

WBAY, “Oshkosh council rescinds Flock camera contract after ‘false statements,’” April 22–23, 2026, including Flock Safety's response statement.

WKBT News 8 and WXOW coverage, July 9–22, 2026; Trempealeau County Times coverage of the July 8 meeting and the July 20 vote.

The Pioneer's separate reporting on the Aug. 11 sheriff's primary and the three candidates' positions on the camera contract.