Fifteen to one: the county censured Andy Parrish for four things. The record supports one.

WHITEHALL — The vote took a few minutes. Fifteen supervisors said yes, one said no, and one — according to the Trempealeau County Times, which sat through the meeting — did not vote at all.

Then Andy Parrish, the District 2 supervisor the resolution was about, declined the exit the board had left open for him.

“Do I regret what I did? No,” he said. “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.”

A censure removes nobody and restricts nothing. Vice Chair Kevin Whalen called it a corrective rather than a punishment: “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.”

Because it has no teeth, the only thing a censure does is put the board’s judgment on paper, permanently, where any voter can pull it. That makes the paper the story. It makes four accusations. The Pioneer checked each against the county’s own recordings, minutes and released footage.

One of four holds up without qualification, and it is the one the county put on television.

The phones

Start with the strangest charge, because it gives the game away.

The resolution faults Parrish for using a personal electronic device during meetings. A Pioneer review of WTCO’s recordings of county board and committee meetings shows supervisors doing exactly that as a matter of course — scrolling, typing, a device held below the table edge, a glance down mid-presentation — across multiple meetings and multiple members.

There is a written rule. The county’s Code of Conduct — § 2.04(2) of the county code — tells supervisors to keep cell phones “turned off or on silent” during any meeting, and not to text during board and committee meetings unless the chair approves. It applies to every supervisor in the room. No other supervisor has been named in a resolution under it.

A rule that exists for everyone and is enforced against one person is not a rule. It is a reason, found afterward, for something already decided.

The attendance charge has the same problem in a different form. Parrish was seated in April and assigned to four bodies — Environment and Land Use, Law Enforcement, Parks and Tourism, and the ADRC board — within days of taking office. The resolution attaches no attendance table, no dates, and no comparison to any other supervisor. It asks the county to accept a finding the board did not show its work for.

What actually happened on July 8

The Law Enforcement and Emergency Management Committee met that morning in the county board room. Parrish had an item on the agenda; he had been trying to get one there for months. He had spent the intervening weeks assembling research, including the figure that put the county on edge — that more than 5,000 outside agencies and organizations had touched Trempealeau County’s license-plate camera network in a single month.

The committee took the Flock Safety company presentation first. Parrish’s item came after. It never got there. Supervisor Scott Leonard moved to lay the matter on the table indefinitely, and the motion carried 4–1. Parrish was the one.

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

Tonya Rebhahn, who was in the room, described the next minutes publicly. Leonard was speaking; Parrish tried to counter and was cut off and told he had to be recognized first. Parrish waited. Parrish was recognized. And then, she wrote, “Scott Leonard interrupts him. Board members didn’t seem to care when Andy got interrupted. There was double standards there.”

That is when Parrish told Leonard to f— off.

This paper does not defend the phrase, and Parrish has not asked anyone to. But the board’s account of that morning begins at the profanity and the county’s recording does not. Two words arrived at the end of a sequence in which a supervisor was ruled out of order for interrupting, then interrupted, then watched his item die before he could speak to it. In Cohen v. California, decided in 1971, the U.S. Supreme Court held the government may not criminalize an offensive word used in political protest — one man’s vulgarity, Justice Harlan wrote, is another’s lyric.

The motion itself is worth a second look. Leonard is a former police officer, a fact Parrish stated publicly the same day and one well known in his Arcadia district. He sits on the Law Enforcement Committee, and the question he moved to table indefinitely was whether the county should keep paying a private surveillance company whose product is sold to, operated by and searched by law enforcement agencies. The minutes record no disclosure of interest by Leonard — not on May 13, when the Flock item first came up, and not on July 8. Wisconsin does not require recusal because a supervisor once worked in a field. But disclosure costs nothing, and it was not offered.

The recess that never happened

Here the record stops being about manners.

A body may recess. It may go into closed session under Wis. Stat. § 19.85 if it states the exemption on the record and takes a roll-call vote. What it may not do is stop conducting the public’s business in public because the business got uncomfortable.

A motion to recess was made during the Parrish exchange. According to the Pioneer’s review of the security-camera footage the county released under the open records law, that motion was never seconded and never carried. No vote was taken. No exemption was cited. Robert’s Rules is unambiguous that a recess requires a second and a vote. The room emptied anyway.

The Pioneer has published the released footage in full and unedited so residents can judge the sequence themselves, rather than take anyone’s characterization of it.

The Pioneer’s open records request, filed with the clerk on July 9, also records that a county employee resigned during or in connection with that period. The Pioneer understands the employee worked for the sheriff’s office. We are not naming the person, who is a private individual and has not been accused of anything — but the resignation is part of a pending request, and the county has not addressed it in any public forum.

What the public got instead

The version of July 8 that reached most residents was not the version in the county’s vault.

Video of the exchange circulated on the Trempealeau County Times Facebook page and on regional television. People who had been physically in the room said the same thing in public within hours of one another: a section was missing. “Don’t say full mtg,” Rebhahn wrote beneath the Times post. “There is a section in the mtg they completely edited out of it.” The Jackson County Pulse page, with no stake in a Trempealeau County committee fight, put it plainest: “People should be able to watch the full, unedited video and judge the exchange for themselves.”

It took a request under Wis. Stat. § 19.35 to get the complete file — filed July 9, asking for the recording “in its entirety and without omission,” for the segment from roughly the 28:57 mark through the motion to recess and its disposition, and for any record of a closed session being convened. Clerk Martin acknowledged it the same day.

None of it proves an intent to conceal. But the sequence describes a county whose default is that the public gets the edited version — and gets the whole one only if somebody files paperwork.

The weekend before the vote, Chair Andy Todd published a long open letter describing the coming resolution as being about “professional conduct and decorum,” not the cameras. He posted it to the county government Facebook page and to the Trempealeau County Sheriff’s Office page. “Unfortunately I thought this was a message from our Sheriff,” Jeanne H. Nutter wrote beneath it. Dave Carlson of Galesville was blunter: “You are not an elected County Executive or Administrator. Stop speaking as if you are the final voice on County policy!” A supervisor is censured for two words in a public meeting; the chair argues his side of it on two official government platforms, including the law enforcement agency’s own page in the middle of a dispute over that agency’s surveillance contract, and nothing happens at all.

Carlson also identified the abstaining supervisor as Ryker Todd — the chair’s son — and said the stated reason was a conflict. The Pioneer could not confirm that from the minutes, which were not posted. Carlson has asked publicly for an explanation and has not received one.

What is actually at stake

The cameras are still up. The signed agreement produced to the Pioneer runs to April 8, 2027, and renews itself for another two years unless the county gives notice about thirty days before — around March 9, 2027.

Chair Todd’s position is that the board’s hands are tied — “The board cannot do anything under the constitution, it’s all about the sheriff,” he told WXOW. That is a real argument about the office of sheriff in Wisconsin and deserves a real answer. It sits awkwardly beside the county’s other position, that the funding “was done two years ago.” A board that appropriated the money is a board with a lever.

The corporation counsel’s June investigative summary found no wrongdoing in how the cameras were approved and found that several statements in Parrish’s May presentation were incorrect. That is on the record too, and this paper is not going to pretend otherwise. A supervisor can be wrong about a filing date and right about the thing that matters — and the thing that matters, that a searchable log of where residents drive was built without the elected board ever voting on it, has not been rebutted by anyone.

None of this has worked as intended. The tabling motion was meant to end the discussion in committee; it sent the video to regional television instead, and made 5,000 agencies a number people in Blair and Arcadia can recite. The censure was meant as a corrective; it produced Parrish’s clearest statement of the case, in the board’s own room, on the record. The three candidates on the August 11 sheriff’s ballot are now asked about Flock at every stop, which they were not in April.

Strip out the personalities and one question is left, and it is not about Andy Parrish’s temperament. It is whether a county board can find four reasons to formally disapprove of a member when three of them apply equally to people it did not name, were never documented in the resolution, or arise from a meeting in which the board’s own conduct is now the subject of an open records request and an unanswered open meetings question.

The board says the censure was not about the cameras. Take it at its word — then explain why the only supervisor pressing the camera question is the only supervisor whose phone use, attendance and tone became a matter of formal record, in the same month, on a resolution written after he said something the room did not want said.

The Pioneer’s requests on the July 8 recording, the recess, and the undersheriff appointment filings remain open. We will publish what comes back, in full, whatever it shows.

A rule that exists for everyone and is enforced against one person is not a rule. It is a reason, found afterward, for something already decided.