The Aug. 11 Republican primary will very likely decide who serves as Trempealeau County’s next sheriff. No Democrat, independent or third-party candidate filed for the office, according to Ballotpedia’s listings, so the winner stands alone on the November ballot, barring a write-in. And by now the campaign has had its sharp edges — a candidate’s public reversal on the county’s license-plate cameras weeks before the vote, hard words about the jail, a race the sitting sheriff, alone among the three, called negative. That is what contested races do in their final weeks. They narrow to the disagreements.
So, with the polls days away, set the sharp edges down for a moment. Here is the other thing true about this race, and the easiest to lose: all three people asking for the job have done this county’s police work themselves, and each would bring something to the office that the other two would not. What follows is what each would bring — positives on purpose, and transparent about it — drawn from the Pioneer’s own reporting and the candidates’ own words, in alphabetical order. Where our reporting hedges a claim, the hedge stays. Nothing here is a recommendation: the Pioneer has endorsed no one, and this piece does not attempt a complete tally of any candidate’s endorsements. It is offered because a county deciding something this close deserves to weigh what it is choosing among, not only what divides it.
Wayne Dahl: 34 years, one county
The résumé Wayne Dahl sent the governor last fall, when the sheriff’s job came open, runs six pages. It is his own account of his career, verified by neither the governor’s office nor this paper — a caution that applies to every candidate’s self-description in this story — and what it describes is one long climb through one county. He pumped gas and turned wrenches at the Conoco station in Trempealeau, went through the 400-hour state police academy in the summer of 1992, and spent nearly eight years with the Village of Trempealeau police, listed as assistant chief by the end, with a stretch of DNR law enforcement at Perrot State Park along the way. In March 2000 he joined the county sheriff’s office as a patrol deputy and took the rungs in order: sergeant, lieutenant, captain, chief deputy since 2022. He spent 21 years on the county’s Emergency Response Team, its SWAT unit, finishing as team commander.
This is not a gotcha type of forum here.
The moderator of the July 30 candidate forum in Whitehall, who told the audience it was doing the hiring; from the county party’s livestream
The Pioneer’s arithmetic on that account: 34 years in law enforcement, 26 of them inside the office he hopes to run, at least 22 at supervisory or command rank. The training list fills most of the six pages — 56 entries across 29 years, including all three FBI-LEEDA leadership courses, a sequence commonly treated as a command credential. By his own description, he already carries much of the desk a sheriff actually runs: jail operations, internal investigations, open-records questions, budget preparation, union contract negotiations, hiring interviews, the monthly law-enforcement committee, grant writing for bullet-resistant vests and Violence Against Women Act funds. Of the four people who applied for the appointment last fall, he was the only one who had held command rank in the department. Three of the county’s retired sheriffs — Randy Niederkorn, Rich Anderson and Brett Semingson — endorsed him, and his campaign named them in April.
He is at his best in the particulars. A deputy working alone on a rural road, he told the July candidate forum, learns that “your mouth is your best tool.” People in a mental-health crisis, often on transports running three and a half hours, must be treated “with dignity and respect.” And on mistakes: “The first thing we need to stand up and do is say, we made the mistake. If we don’t hold ourselves accountable, how can we go out and hold the public accountable?” His closing pitch was the shortest of the three — “I want to provide the professional leadership at the Sheriff’s Office, backed with experience” — and he was frank about what the desk job costs: “I am pretty much stuck to my office … it gets to be kind of lonely. So this is kind of a nice change for me to be out here.”
One moment in the record says as much as the six pages. On Dec. 12, the governor’s office emailed to tell him he had not gotten the appointment. Fifty-four minutes later he answered, in five words: “Thanks for letting me know.” Then he stayed on as second-in-command to the person who beat him, and went back to work.
Kent Johnson: the chief who already runs a department
Kent Johnson has led the Blair Police Department since August 2020 — nearly six years of budgets, policies and personnel decisions in a department small enough that the chief is one of its three or four full-time officers. Alone in this field, he has run a law-enforcement agency of his own for years rather than months, and he once worked at the sheriff’s office he now hopes to lead. His campaign bio counts a career in law enforcement since 2002 and U.S. Navy service during Desert Shield and Desert Storm, and closes with the part that is not a credential at all: “Husband, dad, and grandpa.”
The record shows a chief who treats teaching as part of the work. He is a certified instructor in firearms, tactical response and casualty care; he has taught concealed-carry qualification courses, run a free firearms-safety class for women this year, and co-taught active-threat training for area fire and EMS crews. At the forum he endorsed “verbal judo,” a de-escalation course he took more than 25 years ago and still uses — “that is something that I would bring here” — described senior-scam presentations he arranged with the state agriculture department, and proposed using two unfilled positions to rotate a school resource officer through county schools. On accountability, he recalled treating a subordinate’s serious mistake as a training failure rather than a firing offense, and said blame “should roll uphill.” Asked about an unpopular decision, he described carrying six pages of notes to his own city council to confront a pattern of traffic stops that had drawn complaints across Blair: “We all know that cops cover for cops, right? Wrong.”
He made the forum’s most unusual promise and its boldest claim about himself in the same answer: if he wins, “Wayne is going to remain as the chief deputy and the under sheriff,” and, “I believe that my leadership skills supersede Wayne’s and I believe I would be a better sheriff.” He has also taken the position that most clearly separates him from the field. He would shut off — and cover — the county’s three Flock license-plate cameras, a stance he reached in reverse and owned out loud: for weeks he called the claim that he would switch them off misinformation, then told supporters in a video, “now I’m telling you that it is correct.” What changed, he said, was asking residents at his meet-and-greet not whether the cameras worked but whether they made people feel safer — and concluding they did not. Agree with it or not, it is a promise specific enough to be kept or broken in public.
He told the forum he became a police officer “because I don’t like seeing people get bullied,” and pledged more public contact if elected, including “at least a monthly show” on the local government TV channel. His closing argument was about a word painted on the squad cars: “We got the protect and serve written on our squad cars but we take out the serve. We need to put that serve back in there.”
Erica Koxlien: the sheriff, seven months in
Erica Koxlien has held the office since Dec. 15, appointed by Gov. Tony Evers when Sheriff Brett Semingson retired — “a respected law enforcement officer, who has served her community well for a decade,” the governor’s announcement said. What the office has done since is her own account, offered the way every candidate’s account is, and she gave it at the forum: dispatch fully staffed for the first time since 2020, in a job she and Dahl both said is hard to hire for; crisis-intervention training for every employee, dispatchers included; a veterans crisis team now launching; a $400,000 grant pending to join the Chippewa Valley forensic lab. “Instead of sending them off and waiting up to 18 months to get evidence back, we can get it back within a day,” she said.
Her decade before the appointment is a specialist’s. She came to the work late and sideways — an associate degree in paralegal studies, years of substitute teaching, a bachelor’s in criminal justice from UW-Eau Claire — and was hired onto county patrol in December 2015. From 2017 she worked investigations, taking the hardest cases: death investigations, narcotics, sexual assault, child maltreatment, financial crimes. She is a certified forensic interviewer and a certified general instructor through the state Department of Justice, and she teaches part time in Western Wisconsin Technical College’s law-enforcement academy. In 2021 and 2022 she went back to school again, for master’s-level coursework in clinical mental health counseling. And she built two programs nobody ordered her to build: Handle With Care, which in her description “alerts school staff if a student experienced a traumatic event that may impact their behavior or performance in school the next day,” and BADGES, a youth program now running in every elementary school in the county.
Asked for three references on her application to the governor, she gave four — two of them described on the page, in her own words, as “Recovering Adult that I’ve arrested and subsequently supported during recovery.” Her cover letter made the argument underneath: “Law enforcement can be, and should be, more than just enforcing laws.”
In July she took 62 percent of the party’s members-only straw poll after the first candidate forum, clearing the 60 percent its endorsement requires — a poll of one room, binding no voter. In a post to her campaign Facebook page Sunday, she wrote that she was “grateful and humbled by the unsolicited endorsement sent to me today by the families of our Trempealeau County Sheriff’s Deputies”; the Pioneer has not seen the endorsement itself. The page has also posted letters of support from individual officers, which the Pioneer has not verified or counted.
At the forum she credited both opponents by name — “complete investigations like Mister Johnson said,” and “honesty and accountability like Mister Dahl said” — and credited Johnson a second time on sharing resources between rural counties. In her closing she was candid about the campaign’s toll — “I am not a politician. I have learned that. My skin is not thick” — and ended with: “If I can’t get elected based on the positive changes I’ve made, then I don’t deserve to be elected.”
Tuesday
Three candidates, one office, and a primary that — with no one else on the November ballot — very likely settles it. They disagree, sometimes sharply, about the cameras, about readiness, about what the job most needs, and voters should weigh those disagreements; this paper’s news pages have reported them at length. But the record assembled here is true too. One candidate has spent 26 years inside the office, the last four as its second-in-command. One has run a department of his own for nearly six years. One holds the badge now and points to seven months of changes she says she has made. The Pioneer has endorsed none of them. The choice belongs to the people of this county, and it is worth showing up for.
Polls are open Aug. 11.