Two campaigns, two sets of books: what the sheriff’s race reports actually show

WHITEHALL — Someone in the courthouse wrote it in ballpoint across the top corner of the first page: “Rec’d 7-15-26 11:15am on my desk.”

That note, initialed “mm,” and an email that landed the night before at 7:32 p.m. are how Trempealeau County took delivery of the two campaign finance reports in the race for sheriff. Chief Deputy Wayne Dahl’s came in on paper, filled out by hand and signed by the candidate himself, on a state form last revised in 2016. Sheriff Erica Koxlien’s came as a spreadsheet, signed by her treasurer, Margaret A. Seefeldt. Both covered January 1 through June 30. Both arrived on time.

Read side by side against the ledgers behind them, they tell a story the summary pages don’t.

Dahl reported $12,619.34 in receipts — more than double the $5,401.34 Koxlien reported. Subtract what each candidate put in themselves, and the picture inverts. Dahl has raised $1,750 from five people. Koxlien has raised $3,480.92 from seventeen contributors, two of them listed as couples.

Where the money came from

Of Dahl’s $12,619.34, some $10,869.34 is his own: a $500 loan to the committee, plus $10,369.34 in signs, shirts, koozies, plywood, parade candy and float materials he bought and reported as contributions to himself. That is 86 percent of everything on the report.

The remaining $1,750 came from Charles Phillips of Trempealeau ($600), Ronie Molitor of Osseo ($600), Richard Anderson of Ettrick ($350), Harlan Reinders of Strum ($100) and Brett Semingson of Eleva, whose $100 is listed as in-kind. Anderson and Semingson share names with two of the retired sheriffs who publicly endorsed Dahl when he announced in April. The report gives no street addresses and no occupations for anyone — which is precisely why a reader cannot confirm they are the same men.

Koxlien’s report runs the other direction. Her own money — $1,920.42, all of it booked as loans — is about 36 percent of her total. Her largest outside supporters are Lori Severson of Galesville ($600); Dana Wedward of Osseo, who gave $552 in campaign chapstick; Colleen Schwerke of Osseo ($200 by check and $300 loaned for parade candy); Gary Schwerke of Osseo ($487.15, also parade candy); Daniel and Allysa McQuillan of Eau Claire ($350); and Brian Trowbridge of Eau Claire, whose $225.97 is two campaign banners, a year’s website domain, two months of hosting and a $10.60 online donation. Sixteen of her outside contributions are under $110. One donor, Eric Lynch, gave $103.29 from Iowa City.

Nobody in either report gave too much. Wis. Stat. § 11.1101(1)(h) caps what an individual may give a candidate for local office at “the greater of” $500 or “two cents times the number of inhabitants of the jurisdiction or district, according to the latest federal census,” to a maximum of $6,000. Trempealeau County’s 2020 census population of 30,760 puts the ceiling here at $615.20. Three donors — Phillips, Molitor and Severson — came within $16 of it and stopped.

That ceiling is not an annual figure. By Ethics Commission guidance, it runs the length of the contribution limit period: for a new candidate, from the day he registers until the day before the winner takes office; for an incumbent, from the day she assumed office. There is no separate allowance for the primary and the general. Phillips, Molitor and Severson each have $15.20 left to give for the rest of this election.

Neither is there any ceiling on what the candidates give themselves. Wis. Stat. § 11.1104(7) exempts from all limits “contributions that a candidate makes to his or her candidate committee from the candidate’s personal funds or property.” Dahl’s $10,869.34 is entirely lawful. It is simply not money anyone else decided to give him.

Where it went

Dahl’s spending is concentrated in two places. Edge Graphics of Arcadia billed $4,775.51 in May and another $1,684.78 in June for yard signs, shirts, can koozies and wristbands — $6,460.29 to one Arcadia shop. Signs on the Cheap, a Texas company, took $2,044.48 for large signs and four vehicle magnets. Roger Dahl of La Crosse was paid $643.29 for a parade float; Menards supplied $237.15 in plywood.

He is also the only candidate in the race who has bought advertising. Dahl reported $585 to Finger Publishing of Black River Falls, listed on the form as the Trempealeau County Times and Arrow Shopper; $336 to Ad-Delite of Strum; and $450 to WHTL radio in Whitehall — $1,371 in ads, and, apart from two parade entry fees, the only money that actually moved through his campaign account this period.

Koxlien’s biggest single expense was $1,450.63 to Supreme Graphics of Arcadia for yard signs, plus $73.85 for a thousand cards. She spent $552 on chapstick from an Ohio supplier, $410 on shirts from Norse Made in Whitehall, $150 more in donated shirts from Rustic Road Shirt Company in Menomonie, $126 on banners, $103.81 on sign stencils from Osseo Plastics, and $118.92 at Menards. She paid $30 in minimum-balance fees to Alliance Bank and $17.17 in Stripe processing fees on online donations. She reported no paid advertising at all.

Wayne Dahl’s report lists twenty contributions from six people. It gives a street address for none of them and an occupation for none of them.

What the forms get wrong

Wis. Stat. § 11.0204(1)(a)1 requires a candidate committee’s report to carry “an itemized statement giving the date, full name, and street address of each person who has made a contribution.” Subdivision 3 adds “the occupation, if any, of each individual contributor whose cumulative contributions to the candidate committee for the calendar year are in excess of $200.”

Dahl’s report supplies city and state only — no street address, no ZIP — for all six of the people on his twenty itemized lines, and no occupation for any of them, including four who cleared $200: Phillips, Molitor, Anderson, and Dahl himself. Koxlien’s report has the occupations right. Everyone on her list who passed $200 is identified — law enforcement, retired, marketing, nurse, business owner.

Dahl’s in-kind bookkeeping does not close. Every one of his fourteen self-funded entries matches, to the penny, an expenditure he flagged “In-Kind Offset” — but the In-Kind box is unchecked on all fourteen receipts. Add up the offsets on the spending side and you get $10,434.34. Add up the contributions available to offset them and you get $10,369.34. The $65 difference is two parade entry fees — $25 to the Arcadia Lions Club, $40 to the Eleva Broiler Festival — marked in-kind with no donor named. Running the other way, Semingson’s $100 in-kind contribution has no matching expenditure anywhere on the report.

Follow only the cash and Dahl’s ending balance moves. Real money in: $1,650 from four donors plus his own $500 loan, or $2,150. Real money out: $1,371 in ads, plus $65 in parade fees if those were paid rather than donated. That leaves somewhere between $714 and $779 — not the $814 the report certifies.

Elsewhere on Dahl’s form, the entire calendar-year-to-date column is blank, the Total Receipts and Total Disbursements lines in the top summary are left empty — the figures appear only farther down, in the cash summary — and the committee name is missing from all three receipt pages. Dahl also checked three report boxes at once — July Continuing, Pre-Primary and Fall. The pre-primary report is a separate filing covering July 1 through July 27, due Aug. 3.

Koxlien’s problem is a bigger number in a single box. Her loan schedule shows $2,846.57 outstanding to her. Her own entries on the receipts schedule add up to $1,920.42. The report does not explain the $926.15 between them.

Her summary page also puts everything on the wrong line. Boxes 1-A and 2-A are labeled “Monetary,” and she entered $5,401.34 and $4,103.69. But $970.14 of that is explicitly in-kind — chapstick, ribbon, spray paint, web hosting, banners, shirts — and another $2,507.57 is money she and the Schwerkes paid vendors directly without it ever touching the account. Actual cash: $1,923.63 in, $625.98 out. Her $1,297.65 ending balance reconciles to the penny against those cash figures, which means the bottom line is right and the labels are not. The error runs against her interest; it makes her look like she raised nearly three times the cash she did.

Three smaller things on her report: all three loans list the guarantor as “Friends of Erica Koxlien” — the borrowing committee itself, under a name that doesn’t match its registration, in a column meant to identify an outside party standing behind the debt. Her own address is entered three different ways across the three loan lines — three different house numbers on the same road. And the beginning-cash line is empty, though § 11.0204(1)(a)6 requires “a statement of the cash balance on hand at the beginning and end of the reporting period.” Dahl filled that box in. His omission is the year-to-date column beside it.

None of this is the kind of finding that ordinarily draws a penalty. Local committees file on paper with the county clerk, not into the state’s searchable database, and nobody audits them unless somebody complains. The usual remedy is an amended report.

The Pioneer emailed both campaigns for comment. Neither had responded by press time.

A third candidate, Kent Johnson, is also on the Aug. 11 Republican primary ballot. No July continuing report for his campaign was among the records reviewed for this story. Whether one was filed, or whether his committee has claimed the state’s limited-activity exemption — available to local committees that keep total activity under $2,500 a year — is a question for the county clerk.

The primary is Aug. 11. Both campaigns owe the clerk one more report before it — a pre-primary filing covering July 1 through July 27, due Aug. 3. It is the last set of books voters will see before they vote.

By the numbers

The documents

Both reports are public records filed with the Trempealeau County Clerk: Dahl’s on form ETHCF-2L (Rev. 01/16), received July 15 at 11:15 a.m.; Koxlien’s on form CF-2LE (Rev. 04/2019), received by email July 14 at 7:32 p.m. Both are candidate committees, and the rules cited here are the candidate-committee rules. Contribution limits for local office: Wis. Stat. § 11.1101(1)(h). Unlimited candidate self-funding: § 11.1104(7). Contributor name and street address: § 11.0204(1)(a)1. Occupation above $200 for the calendar year: § 11.0204(1)(a)3. Beginning and ending cash balance: § 11.0204(1)(a)6. Loans and donated goods both count as contributions under § 11.0101(8)(a). The contribution limit period is described in Wisconsin Ethics Commission guidance rather than defined in § 11.1101 itself.