WHITEHALL — The room already exists.
That was the first thing Judge Rian Radtke told the county’s Executive and Finance Committee on the morning of March 2, according to the minutes of that meeting: the county had anticipated a second judge for some time, and the office space had been built for it.
The second thing he told them was that he was waiting on a number.
A study from the Director of State Courts would be out Thursday of that week, he said. Under the last one — built on filings from 2021 through 2023 — Trempealeau County had the third-highest caseload in Wisconsin, he told the committee. The Legislature had already considered an assembly bill adding judicial branches in four other counties. Trempealeau was not one of them.
He had reached out — to the committee’s chair, David Larson, to County Administrator Rebecca Glewen, to the Wisconsin Counties Association — and had been encouraged, the minutes record, to proceed with a resolution.
The number arrived in May. It was worse than third.
What the study says
The Wisconsin Judicial Needs Assessment, prepared for the Director of State Courts Office by the National Center for State Courts, was released May 20. It is the first full rebuild of the state’s weighted caseload model since 2016, drawn from a four-week time study last October in which 99 percent of the state’s circuit judges and court commissioners logged their working hours.
Appendix F applies the model county by county, using average filings from 2023, 2024 and 2025. Trempealeau County’s line reads: 4,355 total filings, a calculated need of 1.83 full-time judicial officers, and an actual complement of 1.18 — one judge, plus 0.18 of a court commissioner.
The last row of that column is the one that matters. The report divides each county’s workload by the judicial officers it actually has. Trempealeau’s figure is 1.55.
No county in Wisconsin is higher. The Pioneer extracted that row for all 69 circuits in the report’s tables and ranked them: the next two are the joint Menominee-Shawano circuit at 1.48 and Brown County at 1.47. The statewide figure is 1.07. La Crosse, more than twice Trempealeau’s size in filings, sits at 1.27.
Both Menominee-Shawano and Brown were named in 2025 Assembly Bill 514, a measure that would have added four circuit court branches. It passed the Assembly in February and died in the Senate on March 23. Trempealeau — the county the state’s own numbers now put first — was not in it.
The court system was careful about what the number is not. Its release announcing the study says the assessment does not evaluate the performance of judges or courts, does not directly measure case backlog, and does not automatically determine where new branches should be added.
What Radtke told the county
Radtke has now carried the request through two committees and onto the County Board’s agenda.
The Executive and Finance Committee took it up March 2 and did two things. Supervisor John Aasen moved to amend the draft resolution to add a full-time bailiff to the positions it designates, alongside a clerk and a judicial assistant; Supervisor Bridgette Turner seconded, and the voice vote was all ayes. Aasen then moved to approve the resolution as amended, seconded by Supervisor Robert Baecker. All ayes again.
The minutes record the division of cost as Radtke described it. The judge and the court reporter are paid by the state. The other three positions would fall to the county, as budget items in 2028 or 2029. The first step, the minutes say, is to signal the state that the county is interested.
Nine days later, the resolution went to the Law Enforcement and Emergency Management Committee. Radtke arrived at 10:13 a.m. and presented it. Supervisor Andy Todd moved, and Supervisor Dawn Truog seconded, to bring it back when the current data became available. It carried 5-0.
That was March 11. The data they were waiting for was published ten weeks later.
In between, the item slipped twice. At the committee’s May 13 meeting, the agenda listed an additional judicial branch request under Radtke’s name; the minutes record that Ashley Berg appeared in his place because he had a family emergency, and the committee voted 5-0 to hold it over again. Five days later, the full County Board’s May 18 agenda carried Resolution 2026-05-01, in support of the state creating a second judicial position within Trempealeau County. The minutes note it was removed for a later date.
Radtke has since told supervisors that his staff held back some cases while he was out on personal leave following the death of his mother, and that he was presented with data showing him to be the most worked judge in the state. That account of the appearance comes from the Pioneer’s publisher, who attended; the county has not yet posted minutes for it. On the workload claim, the state’s own study now says the same thing.
Ramona Gonzalez — who sat on the La Crosse County Circuit Court from 1995 until her retirement in 2025 and served as president of the National Council of Juvenile and Family Court Judges — told Radtke’s staff that the work he was expected to do was extraordinary, according to the same account.
Why 2028 is the floor
Wisconsin used to have an administrative route. Under s. 753.0605, created by 2019 Wisconsin Act 184, the Director of State Courts could add four circuit court branches in each of three rounds, so long as a county passed a resolution asking for one and had the infrastructure built. The last of those windows closed in November 2022, and the branches it produced — in Clark, Manitowoc, Sawyer and Wood counties — began operating Aug. 1, 2023.
That authority is spent. Adding a branch now takes an act of the Legislature amending s. 753.06, the statute that fixes the number of branches in each county by name.
AB514, though it failed, shows what that looks like. The bill would have added branches in Brown County and the Menominee-Shawano circuit beginning Aug. 1, 2027, and a second Brown County branch and one in Kenosha County beginning Aug. 1, 2028. Each came with a companion clause setting the initial election of its judge at the spring election of the year the branch begins.
That calendar is what makes 2028 the floor for Trempealeau. A branch has to be authorized in statute before candidates can run for it; judges take the bench on Aug. 1; and with this session’s bill dead, the soonest a new one could pass is the session that convenes in 2027 — in time, at best, for a spring 2028 election and an Aug. 1, 2028 branch.
The county’s own paperwork already assumes that timeline. The March 2 minutes put the clerk, judicial assistant and bailiff in the 2028 or 2029 budget.
The man asking
Radtke is not new to the county’s payroll. He was Trempealeau County’s corporation counsel before he was its judge, and he ran for the bench from that office in 2017, beating Rick Schaumberg 2,856 to 2,594 in the April general election after both advanced past incumbent Charles Feltes in the February primary. He ran again in 2023 and was unopposed. He has administered the oath of office to the County Board itself — the swearing-in ceremony at the board’s April 2024 organizational meeting was his.
Supervisor Andy Parrish, who represents District 2, offered his own assessment. “Rian Radtke has given this county his career — as its lawyer and now as its judge — and the state just confirmed what we already knew: nobody on a Wisconsin bench works harder,” Parrish said in a statement to the Pioneer. “He is an honorable and respectable man, a credit to the law and to this community. When a judge like that says he needs help, you help him.”
One line of opinion, the writer’s own: Radtke is certainly worthy of the help he is asking for, and a credit to this county.
What the county had not done as of its last posted minutes is vote. The resolution cleared one committee in March, was held in a second, and came off the board’s May agenda before it was called. The study that second committee was waiting for has been out since May 20, and it says what Radtke said it would say.
The Legislature is the only body that can create the branch. The County Board is the only one that can tell it Trempealeau wants one.
The documents
Posted county records: Executive and Finance Committee agenda and minutes, March 2, 2026; Law Enforcement and Emergency Management Committee agendas and minutes, March 11 and May 13, 2026; County Board minutes, April 21 and May 18, 2026; County Board agenda, April 16, 2024.
Caseload figures: Wisconsin Judicial Needs Assessment Study 2025, prepared by the National Center for State Courts for the Director of State Courts Office, released May 20, 2026, Appendix F, printed page 70. The ranking is the Pioneer’s own tabulation of the report’s Workload per Judicial Official row across all counties. The study’s limitations are described in the Wisconsin Court System’s May 20 release and companion guide. Statute and bill text: Wis. Stat. ss. 753.06 and 753.0605; 2025 Assembly Bill 514 (failed March 23, 2026). Election results: Ballotpedia and the Wisconsin Court System’s Third Branch eNews, April 2023.