Wayne Dahl has the strongest file in the sheriff’s race. He still owes the county an answer.

On Dec. 12 last year, at 10:01 in the morning, the governor's office emailed Wayne Dahl a form letter: he would not be Trempealeau County's sheriff. Fifty-four minutes later he answered. The reply was five words: "Thanks for letting me know."

Four applied when Sheriff Brett Semingson retired. Erica Koxlien alone got a final interview, on Dec. 9, and was congratulated on the appointment within the hour; the governor formally appointed her on Dec. 12. Dahl stayed seven months as second in command to the person who beat him. Now he is running against her, and against Blair Police Chief Kent Johnson, in the Aug. 11 Republican primary.

After reading the 238-page appointment file, obtained under Wisconsin's public records law, this paper was blunt: "On the résumés alone, this is not close." Set the verdict aside and enter the record itself, item by item, the way the file gives it, with the caution the file demands: what follows is Dahl's own account of his career, verified by neither the governor's office nor this paper.

The ladder first.

The expertise everyone praises is the expertise voters are being denied.

• 1986 to 1992: pumping gas and turning wrenches at the Conoco station in Trempealeau.
• June 1992: the Village of Trempealeau Police Department, nearly eight years, listed as assistant chief by the end; the 400-hour Wisconsin police academy, Chippewa Valley Technical College, that same summer.
• Concurrently, 1993 to 1994: state DNR law enforcement at Perrot State Park.
• March 2000: the Trempealeau County Sheriff's Office. Patrol deputy, 2000 to 2004.
• Patrol sergeant, 2004 to 2011. Patrol lieutenant, 2011 to 2018. Patrol captain, 2018; administrative captain, 2018 to 2022.
• Chief deputy since 2022.
• The county Emergency Response Team, its SWAT unit, for 21 years, 2001 to 2022: operator, team leader, assistant team commander, team commander.

Then the courses, still his own listing. The résumé runs six pages, and the training list fills most of them: 56 entries across 29 years, from a robbery-response course in October 1992 to the last entry in 2021. A sample, as the file lists them:

• The working inventory of a patrol career: radar operator, breath test, field sobriety, hazardous materials, chemical spray, lidar, drug interdiction, rail incidents, death investigation, FBI interview and interrogation, FBI criminal investigative analysis.
• NTOA SWAT commander training, 2015.
• FBI-LEEDA internal affairs investigations, 2020.
• All three FBI-LEEDA leadership courses, Supervisor, Command and Executive, in 2021, a sequence commonly treated as a command credential.
• The International Chiefs of Police Association's Leadership in Police Organizations through UW-Platteville, September 2006 to May 2007; the Badger State Sheriff's Association Ethical Leadership Academy, listed in 2015.

Then the desk, which is most of what a sheriff actually runs. By his own description:

• Everyday jail operations, internal investigations, open-records questions, budget preparation, union contract negotiations, hiring interviews, the monthly law-enforcement committee meeting.
• Grant writing: bullet-resistant vests, Click It and Violence Against Women Act funds.

An October 2025 reference letter from Dispatch Sgt. Todd Roessler credits him as lead for the transition and upgrade of the county's Emergency Communication Center. Weigh that one for what it is: a solicited reference from a sergeant inside the office.

That is the itemization. The arithmetic on it is the Pioneer's, not his: 33 years in law enforcement when he applied and 34 now, 26 of them in the county office, at least 22 at supervisory or command rank, and no other applicant had held command rank in the department he hoped to run. And one honest limit: Wisconsin asks no college degree of a sheriff, but Koxlien has the degrees, a bachelor's in criminal justice, an associate in paralegal studies, master's-level coursework in mental-health counseling. Dahl has a diploma, the academy and 84 credits of auto mechanics from Winona Technical College.

None of that is an endorsement, from me or from this paper, which has endorsed nobody in this race. "Most qualified" is a claim about a record. It does not mean he will win. It does not say he should. The county GOP's members-only straw poll after the July 30 forum went 62 percent Koxlien, 19 apiece Dahl and Johnson, and with it the party's endorsement. The 62 percent and the threshold are this paper's reporting; the 19-19 split comes from a comment under the party's livestream, unpublished by the party and unconfirmed by this paper. The poll binds nobody. Handle them with tongs. Still, they rhyme with the appointment he lost: rooms reward things a file does not measure.

At that forum he said, "I am pretty much stuck to my office ... it gets to be kind of lonely. So this is kind of a nice change for me to be out here." His closing pitch was the shortest of the three: professional leadership, backed with experience. He was better in the particulars. A deputy working alone on a rural road, he said, learns "your mouth is your best tool." Mental-health detentions, he said, pull people "completely out of their support system," with transports running three and a half hours; people in crisis must be treated "with dignity and respect." On mistakes: "The first thing we need to stand up and do is say, we made the mistake."

The campaign money is mostly his, $10,869.34 of $12,619.34 in reported receipts: a $500 loan to the committee and $10,369.34 in goods he bought and reported as contributions to himself, signs, shirts, koozies, plywood, parade candy, a float. Five outside donors gave $1,750. His report and Koxlien's both had disclosure defects under state law; Dahl filed an amended report on July 27 supplying the missing occupations, and the street addresses are still absent. Campaigns reward what Dahl does worst. The office runs on what he has done for 34 years.

Sheriff Koxlien's file is strong in a different shape; her résumé is one page to his six. Ten years in law enforcement, county patrol from December 2015, investigations two years later; a specialist's record in death investigation, narcotics, sexual assault, child maltreatment and financial crimes; a certified forensic interviewer; the BADGES program now in every county elementary school. At the forum she said dispatch is fully staffed for the first time since 2020, her account, offered the way Dahl's résumé is his. Her closing was the opposite of a shrug: "If I can't get elected based on the positive changes I've made, then I don't deserve to be elected."

Johnson has been an officer since 2002 and Blair's chief for nearly six years, a Navy veteran of Desert Shield and Desert Storm who once worked at the sheriff's office himself, certified to instruct in firearms, tactical response and casualty care. At the forum he promised that if he wins, "Wayne is going to remain as the chief deputy and the under sheriff," then added, "I believe that my leadership skills supersede Wayne's and I believe I would be a better sheriff." Note the shape of that: even the man running against Dahl plans to keep Dahl running the day-to-day.

Three retired Trempealeau County sheriffs have endorsed Dahl; his campaign named them in April as Randy Niederkorn, Rich Anderson and Semingson. Two of the three also figure in the appointment file. Semingson is his listed reference. Anderson, now a county board member, called the governor's office for Dahl on Dec. 8, three days after Koxlien had been named the lone finalist. The constituent staff logged the call. Nothing in the file suggests it was answered, considered or shown to anyone making the choice. By then the decision was effectively down to one person, and it wasn’t Dahl.

Now, the cameras.

Three Flock Safety cameras on Highways 93, 35 and 53 read every passing vehicle's plate, color, make and model, and keep each record 30 days. A sales email came in cold on July 29, 2024. Semingson answered it in 23 minutes. The pitch came Aug. 15; a $12,750 line went into the sheriff's 2025 budget request that same morning. A committee discussed the cameras on Sept. 11 and moved nothing. The county board adopted the budget on Nov. 12 with the money inside, and Semingson signed the contract three days later. No elected body has ever separately voted on the cameras; the closest thing is the Galesville council voting to let a county camera stay on a city pole. In June, the county's corporation counsel reviewed the process and found "no wrongdoing or significant errors in process." The money is modest: $11,650 the first year, $9,000 a year after, $20,650 over the deal.

Semingson made Dahl the county's first Flock administrator in December 2024, a job he did not seek. When the cameras went live in April 2025, Dahl sent staff their logins with what he called an initial operating procedure, the only written internal limit on the system in county records: log a reason for every search, expect periodic audits. All 21 of Flock's automated share-request notices were addressed to him; at least 118 agencies appear across them, and New Berlin's police asked to search before the county had a working camera. The records do not show which of those requests were granted; the Pioneer's request for the county's audit log is still open. In August 2025 he told Flock three more cameras were in the office's 2026 budget proposal. The man who signed for them is Dahl's listed reference and one of his endorsers; one name runs through the résumé and the controversy.

He has now spoken about the cameras once, and it is worth setting out in full. On July 29, on WTCO, Trempealeau County's community television channel, host Melissa Kono asked him directly for his stance. “I think they can add value to our law enforcement, as a law enforcement tool,” Dahl said. He named two conditions he called non-negotiable: “if we're using a piece of equipment that violates people's rights, or if us and Trempealeau County law enforcement aren't using it appropriately, or only for law enforcement purposes.” He said the office has policy and procedure in place, that he did not anticipate a problem in this county, and that he was “prepared to hold our employees accountable if there was a breach of that trust.”

That is a stance on the cameras. It is not an answer to the question this column asks. Nowhere in that interview, or anywhere else in the public record this paper has reviewed, has he said whether he would keep, expand or end the program when the contract comes due. He did not answer the written questions this paper sent before its July 25 report. His campaign page, reviewed Aug. 3, shows parades, firemen's dances, a Father's Day post, nothing on the cameras.

The résumé is why the silence matters. Dahl issued the audit rule; nobody in the county has better reason to know how little a logged reason proves. In July a former Milwaukee officer, Josue Ayala, was sentenced after what prosecutors said were 179 Flock searches on two plates, a woman he had dated and her former partner, each search logged with one word, "investigation." That is what the log-a-reason safeguard looks like when a person decides to beat it. Koxlien switched off a sharing setting this spring that the Trempealeau County Times reported had let agencies nationwide view the county's data, the only change either sheriff has made to narrow it; her successor can switch it back on. Her successor may be him. Wisconsin, meanwhile, is edging the other way. By this June, the Wisconsin Examiner reported, Dane County, Verona, Monona, Fitchburg, Appleton, Oshkosh and Sturgeon Bay were dropping their Flock contracts. The expertise everyone praises is the expertise voters are being denied.

No scientific poll on the cameras exists; what is visible is informal and runs one way. The July week the county board censured the cameras' chief critic over his conduct, some 149 private citizens commented across four Facebook threads, two of them on official county pages. That is a count of participation, not a measurement of the county. Opposition filled the threads all the same. One comment, on the sheriff's office's own Facebook page, said the only question about Flock is "when are they leaving our county!?" Another lumped Flock in with Axon, Palantir and FISA. Only one of those has hardware on Highway 93; the objection is to the category. Candidates get asked about the cameras at nearly every stop now, though the July 30 forum livestream records no camera question. In April they were not asked at all.

Under the signed agreement the county has produced, and the records show no amendment to it, the contract runs to April 8, 2027, and renews for two more years unless someone cancels by about March 9, nine weeks after the winner takes office Jan. 4. On the county's practice that call belongs to the sheriff, though the board chair and the cameras' critics disagree about whether a board that appropriates the money can stop it, and corporation counsel has published no opinion. No Democrat or independent filed, so the Aug. 11 primary effectively settles it, barring a write-in. Johnson alone has answered: shut the cameras off on day one and cover them, "because I really don't trust what Flock could still see" through cameras the county only leases. It took a reversal; for weeks he called the day-one-shutoff claim misinformation before his late-July video allowed, "now I'm telling you that it is correct." Koxlien defends the cameras as a public-safety tool and, in her own WTCO interview the same day, said she wants to know “what the people want” — without saying what happens at renewal. Dahl says the cameras can add value, with conditions. Neither has said what they would do when the notice falls due.

Voters are owed the answer before Aug. 11. Keep, expand or end, for these cameras and any network like them, whatever name is on the invoice. Not a promise to review it. A position. My own preference, disclosed so you can discount it, is that the county should get out — that a private company should not hold a searchable record of where the people of this county drive. It is not this paper’s position and it is not a condition. Any answer, in public, on the record, is what is owed. At the forum, his sentence about mistakes had a second half: "If we don't hold ourselves accountable, how can we go out and hold the public accountable?" He has now given the county a stance. What he has not given it is a decision. He answered the governor in five words. This one takes more, and eight days remain.