Erica Koxlien built what this county didn’t know it needed. She still owes it one answer.

The application asked for three references. Erica Koxlien gave four. Two of them were people she had arrested.

Her reference page describes both the same way, in her own words: “Recovering Adult that I’ve arrested and subsequently supported during recovery.” I have never seen a reference page like it. It is not the sort of thing you put in front of a governor unless you believe it is the best evidence you have about the kind of officer you are.

Her cover letter says the rest out loud: “Law enforcement can be, and should be, more than just enforcing laws.”

That is the sentence I keep coming back to, eight days out, because this county is about to decide something and most of the noise has been about three cameras on three highways. The cameras matter. I will get to them, and I will ask her for something. A race decided only on surveillance would miss almost everything that is actually on this woman’s record — and that record, not the cameras, is the best argument she has. This paper wrote separately this week that on tenure and command Wayne Dahl has the strongest file in the race. Both things are true, and a voter has to weigh them.

She came to it late, and sideways

Koxlien did not grow up in a squad car. An associate degree in paralegal studies from Western Wisconsin Technical College in 2004. Substitute teaching in the Osseo-Fairchild schools from 2011 to 2014. A bachelor’s in criminal justice from UW-Eau Claire in 2012. She was hired onto patrol here in December 2015, at an age when plenty of people are settling into whatever they already do.

Ten years later she runs the department. In between she moved to investigations in 2017 and took the cases most people in this work try to hand to somebody else: death investigations, narcotics, sexual assault, child maltreatment, financial crimes. She became a certified forensic interviewer — the person who sits in a small room with a frightened child and has to get the truth without putting it in the child’s mouth. She is also certified to instruct other officers through the state Department of Justice.

Then she went back to school again. In 2021 and 2022 she took master’s-level coursework in clinical mental health counseling at UW-Superior. Not a management degree. Not a leadership certificate. Counseling.

You can read a résumé as a list of jobs. You can also read it as an answer to the question of what somebody thinks the work is for.

The part that shows up in schools

The clearest thing on her file is what she built when nobody made her.

She was the sheriff’s office’s Drug Endangered Children officer, and she still teaches. Since February 2025 she has instructed part time in the law enforcement academy at Western Wisconsin Technical College’s Sparta campus. Since that July she has taught working officers, for a private firm, how to investigate drug endangered children cases.

She implemented Handle With Care in Trempealeau County. In her description it “alerts school staff if a student experienced a traumatic event that may impact their behavior or performance in school the next day.” Read that slowly. A deputy goes to a house at two in the morning. There is a child in that house. In the ordinary course, that child shows up at school six hours later and a teacher sees a kid who will not sit still or will not speak, and grades it as behavior. Handle With Care is a quiet message to the school that says: something happened, go easy. Somebody has to care enough to build it.

She also developed BADGES — Building Alliances, Delivering Guidance, Educating Students — a youth program now running in every elementary school in this county.

Her work “underscores her belief that effective law enforcement extends beyond enforcement — it also involves prevention, education, and community collaboration.”

Sgt. Andrew Bilski, in the reference letter in her appointment file

The one reference letter the state produced from her file was written by Patrol Sgt. Andrew Bilski last October. He calls her “an integral member of our department for 10 years” and spends his weight on the drug endangered children work — “a role that requires exceptional sensitivity and a deep understanding of how substance abuse impacts children and families.” Bilski works in the office she now runs, and a reference solicited for an application is exactly that. But the thesis he attributes to her is the same one her own cover letter makes, and the same one her ten years of casework makes without anybody writing it down.

What she said she’d do, before she had to

Her cover letter to the governor argued that “Trempealeau County is rapidly changing” and that “remaining status quo leaves us falling further behind.” The priorities she named were not the ones that win a room: the county’s growing Hispanic community, generational cycles of criminality, the stigma around mental health, and substance use disorder treated as something other than a booking.

She wrote that in October, when she was applying for a job four people wanted. She could have written anything.

Seven months

Gov. Tony Evers appointed her on Dec. 12 and she took office Dec. 15. In the release announcing it, Evers called her “a respected law enforcement officer, who has served her community well for a decade.”

What she has done since is her own account, offered the way every candidate’s account is, and it is worth hearing.

• Dispatch is fully staffed for the first time since 2020 — in a job both she and Dahl told the forum is hard to hire for. Patrol drew about a dozen qualified applicants in the latest round.
• Crisis intervention training for every employee in the office, dispatchers included.
• A veterans crisis team, now launching.
• A $400,000 grant pending to join the Chippewa Valley forensic lab, so phone evidence can be pulled here. In her words: “Instead of sending them off and waiting up to 18 months to get evidence back, we can get it back within a day.” Eighteen months is how long a case can sit. It is also how long a family can wait.
• In the next 90 days, she says, a domestic violence community response team, and possibly bond monitoring.

None of that is glamorous. All of it is the job.

In July her party agreed. Koxlien took 62 percent of the members-only straw poll after the Republicans’ first candidate forum, clearing the 60 percent the party requires, and with it the endorsement. The poll binds nobody and turnout on Aug. 11 will not look like a room in Whitehall. It is still the clearest signal anyone in this race has.

How she carries it

Read the transcript of the forum and something stands out. Three people wanted the same job, and the sharpest lines of the night were aimed at rivals. She named her management style “transformational” and then described something plainer: “I am out there with the staff. I am doing a traffic stop … I don’t want to ever lose touch with what they do on a day-to-day basis.”

Asked about discipline, she called for “clear expectations and consistent follow through” — and then credited both of her opponents by name, “complete investigations like Mister Johnson said” and “honesty and accountability like Mister Dahl said.” On the budget she credited Johnson again, on sharing resources between rural counties. She was the only candidate that night to say the race had turned negative.

“I am not a politician,” she said. “I have learned that. My skin is not thick.” She said she keeps the supportive notes people send her and reads them. Some readers will hear weakness in that. I hear a person who has not yet learned to perform, running for an office where the performance usually comes first.

And then the sentence I would keep: “If I can’t get elected based on the positive changes I’ve made, then I don’t deserve to be elected.”

Now the cameras — and the one thing left

Three Flock cameras sit on Highways 93, 35 and 53, reading every plate that passes and holding each record for 30 days. She did not buy them. A sales email arrived cold in July 2024; Sheriff Brett Semingson answered it in 23 minutes, the money rode inside the budget the board adopted that November, and the contract was signed three days later. No elected body in this county has separately voted on the cameras — the nearest thing is the Galesville council’s vote to let a county camera stay on a city pole. In June the county’s corporation counsel reviewed the purchase and found “no wrongdoing or significant errors in process.” Koxlien arrived more than a year after the signature, with every default already set.

Then she did the only thing any sheriff here has done about it. Under public pressure this spring she switched off a sharing setting — one the Trempealeau County Times, which first reported the change, described as having let agencies nationwide view the county’s camera data. The county’s records do not show which setting it ran, or which one she changed. She narrowed a system she has publicly defended, which is harder than narrowing one you oppose.

But a setting is not a decision. It lives in a vendor’s software and it conveys with the office; the next sheriff can switch it back on, and nothing in the records the county has produced stops them. The county’s own records show at least 118 outside agencies across 21 automated share-request notices, and Flock’s December 2024 onboarding advice was to auto-approve requests “on a statewide level.” The records do not show which of those requests were granted; this paper’s request for the county’s audit log is still open. And in July a former Milwaukee officer was sentenced after what prosecutors said were 179 Flock searches on two license plates — a woman he had dated and her former partner — every search logged, every reason one word: “investigation.” A logged reason is not oversight.

Under the signed agreement the county has produced, and the records show no amendment to it, the term runs to April 8, 2027 and renews for another two years unless notice is given about March 9 — roughly nine weeks after the next sheriff is sworn in. 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 also stop it, and corporation counsel has published no opinion.

So here is my ask, and it is mine — not hers, not this paper’s. Before Aug. 11, say what happens at renewal. I would like the answer to be that the county gets out, and that a private company stops holding a searchable record of where the people of this county drive. But the answer I need is any answer, in public, on the record.

She has not given one yet — but she has said more than this paper knew when it last wrote about her.

On July 29, on WTCO, Trempealeau County’s community television channel, host Melissa Kono asked her directly for her stance on the cameras. Her answer ran several minutes and it is the fullest account she has given.

She began with the detective. Before she was sheriff, she said, she found Flock “an extremely useful tool” in investigations; when she took the office she inherited it as “more than just a tool I used, but a tool that I was responsible for.” She said both sides of the argument have a case.

Then the part that is news. When she took over, she said, there was no Flock policy in the office at all — nothing written governing how the system was used — and she called that concerning. One of the first things her office did was write one. That sits oddly against the county’s own records, which contain the operating procedure Dahl circulated in April 2025, the one this paper has described as the only written internal limit on the system’s use. Both things cannot be quite right, and the difference is worth someone asking her about.

On the sharing setting, she was blunter on television than the record had shown. She said she had not liked that so many agencies were simply typing a plate into a search and pulling from this county’s cameras — that a search run in California would reach Trempealeau County — and that she turned it down to only agencies the county agrees to. She said the office is running audits, that the policy is posted on the sheriff’s office website along with a transparency portal showing what searches have been run, and that she is open to questions from anyone in the county.

And she said this: she wants to know what the people want, and she has encouraged the county board to find out.

That is a sheriff inviting the public in, and it is more than either of her opponents has offered. It is still not the thing this column asks for. In that interview, at the July 30 forum the next night — whose livestream records no camera question — and anywhere else in the public record this paper has reviewed, she has not said whether she would keep the contract past its term. She did not answer this paper’s written questions before its July 25 report. She has defended the cameras as a public-safety tool, and nothing here pretends otherwise.

I am asking her for it rather than only asking the men, and the reason is not that she owes more. It is that she is the only one of the three who can do anything before January. Wayne Dahl and Kent Johnson can describe a decision. She can make one. That is what holding the office means, and it is the one part of this job that does not wait for an election.

What the file actually says

Ten years is not thirty-four. Her résumé is one page and Dahl’s is six, and this paper has written plainly that on tenure and command the comparison is not close. That is true, and a voter can weigh it and choose him, and it would not be an unreasonable vote. Her campaign finance report, like his, was filed with disclosure defects under state law; this paper reported both.

But length is not the only measure of a file, and a sheriff’s office is not only an organization to be run. It is the thing that shows up at the worst hour of somebody’s life. The person who decides what happens next is the sheriff, and what she believes the work is for decides what that person does.

Erica Koxlien was asked for three references and gave four, and two of them were people she had arrested and then supported through recovery. Whatever else that is, it is an answer to the question of what the work is for. She has eight days to answer one more.