We put a question on our Facebook page: somewhere in this county, we said, there’s an elected official who returns every phone call, reads every page of the packet, and stays until the last question gets answered — and nobody says thank you. We asked you to nominate them.
You brought names — more than a dozen, from the courthouse to the village halls to the school boards. Some came with a story attached, some with just a name and an office, all with the same undertone: this person does the work. Consider this column the paper’s way of saying thank you where everyone can see it.
Start at the courthouse, because that’s where the question pointed. One reader nominated Andy Todd, “a calm professional leader in the face of chaos,” as the nomination put it. Todd has won his District 5 seat three straight times, the last two without an opponent, and he chairs the 17-member county board — a job that is mostly patience with a gavel attached: keep seventeen supervisors pointed in the same general direction, keep the meeting moving, stay until the last question gets answered.
On that same board, Andy Parrish has represented District 2 only since April; a neighbor put his name forward all the same.
Another reader’s nominations went straight to the offices where the county’s paperwork either works or doesn’t. Mary Martin, the county clerk, runs the elections everybody else gets congratulated for winning. Nobody ran against her in 2024, and 13,711 of you filled in her name anyway — one of the highest tallies on the whole ballot. You don’t fill in an oval you don’t have to unless you mean it. Mary Lee, clerk of circuit court since 2024, keeps the courthouse’s records in order. Susan Fisher, the corporation counsel, holds the appointed job nobody claps for: telling the county what the law allows before it acts, not after. The same reader added “all of the records custodians” — the people in those offices, and in Register of Deeds Sue Ackerman’s, who answer public-records requests on deadlines state law doesn’t bend. This newspaper files its share of those requests. We’ll second that nomination with feeling.
The thank-yous didn’t stop at the courthouse door. A reader nominated John Kimmel, Arcadia’s mayor. Kimmel lost the 2022 mayor’s race by five votes. Five. If you ever catch yourself wondering whether one vote counts, go ask Arcadia. Most of us would have taken up woodworking. He stood for it again in 2026 and won going away. Losing that close and coming back is its own kind of public service.
In the Town of Trempealeau, Ryan Hilton was nominated as the town board’s “president.” The proper title is town chairman, but if the title was a hair off, the gratitude wasn’t.
The post allowed that employees who earn it count, too — it said county employees, but nobody in the comments was in a mood to be technical. Kathy Peterson, who keeps the Village of Trempealeau running as its certified municipal clerk, made the list, and so did Kent Johnson, Blair’s chief of police. Those are the nominations that tell you a town feels looked after.
The school boards got their due. Adam Leavitt was put forward for his service on the G-E-T board, where he holds the Town of Gale seat — the quiet, packet-reading kind of work the original post had in mind. Tonya Rebhahn, who serves on the Arcadia school board as its vice president, was nominated by name and then used her own comment to nominate somebody else, which tells you about everything you need to know. Jennifer Kamrowski Solberg, who serves on the Independence school board, made the list as well.
One nomination reached across the county line: Adam Manka, elected to the La Crosse school board in 2024 at eighteen, while he was still a high-school senior — one of the youngest elected officials in Wisconsin. He serves La Crosse’s schools, not ours. We’ll brag on a neighbor anyway.
A word about the nominators, because the generosity in that thread ran both directions. One of them is himself a former county board supervisor, and he spent his whole comment lifting up other people — Kimmel in Arcadia, Manka in La Crosse. Nobody models the spirit of the thing better than somebody who has been in the chair, and out of it, and still shows up cheering.
And then there’s the reader who started the whole thing, naming seven people across three school boards, the county board, a police department, a town board and a village office. Urged to add her own name to the list, she wouldn’t have it: “I’m not calling myself, that’s inappropriate.” The person who lights the candle and then steps back out of the light — if you want to know what this column is about, that’s it, right there.
Our post ended with a prediction: they’d never ask for any of this. Sure enough, nobody named here did. That’s exactly why.