13 Price County Towns Ignored Our Public Records Requests. State Law Says They Can’t.

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📌 Important Update — July 12, 2026: The narrative of this story has shifted significantly since publication. After sending physical letters and continuing to follow up, 15 of 21 Price County clerks have now responded to our requests. Evidence from multiple clerks confirms that email delivery failures — specifically junk mail filtering — were a significant factor in the original non-responses, not willful non-compliance. We want to be clear and fair: the original framing of “13 towns ignored our requests” reflected what we knew at the time, but the fuller picture is that many of those clerks never received our emails. We regret any implication that non-responsive clerks were deliberately ignoring lawful requests. The accountability concern about email infrastructure and transparency remains valid, but it is a different problem than clerks choosing to violate the law. Details below.

Over the past month, Price County Fun made public records requests to every municipality in the county under Wisconsin’s Open Records Law (§19.35). We asked for meeting minutes, agendas, and correspondence — the basic paperwork of local democracy.

Six municipalities responded. But 13 others — more than two-thirds of the towns in Price County — never responded at all, even after a second written request citing their obligations under state law.

Wisconsin law is clear: public records “shall be provided as soon as practicable and without delay.” Silence is not a valid response.

Who Responded

Village of Catawba — full records provided
Town of Elk — directed to website, subscribed to updates
City of Park Falls — directed to published records
Town of Emery — full records provided
Town of Worcester — responded after follow-up, records in progress
Village of Flambeau — full records provided

Who Did Not Respond

Town of Catawba
Town of Eisenstein
Town of Georgetown
Town of Hackett
Town of Harmony
Town of Hill
Village of Kennan
Town of Kennan
Town of Knox
Town of Lake
Town of Ogema
Town of Prentice
Town of Spirit

Some of these towns have no public website. Others have websites that haven’t been updated in months. The only way to get their meeting records is to email the clerk directly — and when the clerk doesn’t respond, there is literally no way for a Price County resident to know what their town board is doing.

This isn’t a technical problem. It’s a transparency problem.

The Wisconsin Open Records Law was written to ensure that government business is conducted in public. When a town clerk ignores a records request, they are denying their residents the ability to hold their local government accountable.

We’ll be sending a third round of requests — and if necessary, filing formal complaints with the Wisconsin Department of Justice.

Separate Requests Still Pending

The City of Phillips has not responded to a records request about Flock surveillance camera contracts and funding. The Price County Sheriff’s Office partially fulfilled its request (providing budget documents) but has not yet released records related to ARPA-funded surveillance equipment. The Village of Prentice, which has a separate .gov website, has not posted meeting minutes since March 2026 despite holding regular monthly board meetings.

What You Can Do

Attend your town board meeting (most meet monthly)
Ask your clerk to post minutes online
If records aren’t provided, file a complaint with the Wisconsin Department of Justice

We’ll continue to track these requests and report on which municipalities comply with Wisconsin’s open records law.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the Wisconsin Open Records Law?

Wisconsin Statute §19.35 gives any person the right to inspect and copy any government record, with limited exceptions. Government agencies must respond “as soon as practicable and without delay.”

Can a municipality simply ignore a records request?

No. Under Wisconsin law, silence is not a valid response. If a custodian denies a request, they must provide a written reason. Ignoring a request entirely violates the statute.

What happens when a municipality doesn’t comply?

Residents can file a complaint with the Wisconsin Department of Justice’s Office of Open Government. In extreme cases, a writ of mandamus can compel disclosure. Courts can award attorney fees and damages of up to $1,000 per violation.

Why don’t some Price County towns have websites?

Small rural towns in Wisconsin are not legally required to maintain websites. Many rely on physical bulletin boards and direct contact with the town clerk. This makes it harder for residents to stay informed, especially those who cannot attend meetings in person.

What records did you request?

We requested meeting minutes, agendas, and correspondence from each municipality’s clerk. These are the most basic government records — the minimum documentation of what elected officials decided and why.

What’s the difference between a town, village, and city in Wisconsin?

Towns are unincorporated townships governed by a board of supervisors. Villages and cities are incorporated municipalities with more formal government structures. All three are subject to the same open records requirements.

Related coverage:

Update June 18, 2026: Round 3 Final Notices Sent

On June 18, 2026, we sent a third and final round of written notices to all 13 non-responsive municipalities from our original May 16 request. Each was given until Friday, June 27, 2026 to provide the requested records or a written response. We also sent a constructive denial notice to the Village of Prentice (a separate municipality with a later request date) with a June 25 deadline.

As of this update, it has been 33 days since the original request was sent on May 16. The 13 municipalities listed above have not responded to any of our four communications:

May 16 — Original request for meeting agendas and minutes
June 2 — Friendly follow-up, 10 business days past deadline
June 9 — Constructive denial notice with 5-business-day deadline
June 18 — Final notice with June 27 deadline

Worcester Update: Request Fulfilled

The Town of Worcester, which had partially responded on June 9, has now fulfilled our request. Clerk Regina Damjanovic provided 2026 bid documents on June 16 and clarified that the proposed gravel pit/asphalt plant on Springs Drive is a Price County Zoning conditional use permit matter, not a Town of Worcester project. We consider the Worcester request closed and thank Clerk Damjanovic for her responsiveness.

Separate Request: Village of Prentice

The Village of Prentice is a separate municipality from the Town of Prentice and was not included in the original May 16 batch because it maintains its own .gov website. However, a June 1 audit found the village website’s meeting minutes were two months behind (last posted: March 9, 2026). A separate records request was sent to [email protected] on June 1, with a follow-up on June 10. No response has been received. A constructive denial notice was sent on June 18 with a June 25 deadline. If the village does not respond, it will be included in any further action alongside the original 13 municipalities.

Complete Communication Log Published

In the interest of full transparency, we are publishing the complete communication log documenting every email sent to every municipality in this investigation. The log includes the full text of all four rounds of correspondence — the original request, two follow-ups, and the final notice.

We are doing this because we believe the public has a right to see exactly how this process unfolded. We also want to be clear: our goal is not to punish anyone. We would rather every municipality simply provide the requested records and put this behind them. Six municipalities already did, some within 48 hours. There is no reason the remaining 13 cannot do the same.

We have not filed any complaint with the Wisconsin Department of Justice. We hope it will not be necessary. But if the 13 municipalities do not respond by June 27, we will publish a follow-up documenting which ones still have not complied.

Download the complete communication log:

Download PDF: Complete Communication Log

Price County Fun Editorial Team — Reporting on Price County government transparency since 2025. Our public records requests were made under Wisconsin Statute §19.35 between May 16 and June 18, 2026. The complete communication log is available for download above.

Update June 28, 2026: Physical Letters Sent to All 14 Non‑Responsive Municipalities

The June 27 deadline has passed. After three rounds of email over 43 days — and zero responses from 14 municipalities — we have escalated to physical letters sent via USPS to each clerk’s town hall address.

The decision to send letters rather than immediately filing complaints was deliberate. We want to rule out the possibility that our emails are not reaching the intended recipients.

The Email Delivery Question

A reasonable question: are our emails actually getting through? We’ve confirmed zero bounces across all three rounds — meaning the receiving mail servers accepted every message. But acceptance is not the same as delivery to a human being.

There are several ways an email can vanish:

Spam filters at consumer providers. Three clerks use Outlook.com addresses and one uses Yahoo — consumer-grade spam filters that can silently route legitimate email to junk folders. A rural clerk checking email once a week on a phone may never see it.
County-level mail filtering. Former County Board Supervisor Jason Hastings publicly alleged that constituent emails to the County Board were being blocked. Hastings told constituents to bypass email and call supervisors directly. If there is an IT-level mail filter within Price County’s infrastructure, it could affect the .gov addresses of town clerks whose email is hosted through the county.
Local ISP filtering. Two clerks use addresses at small regional ISPs (PCTCNET, CenturyTel). These providers may have aggressive default spam settings.
Sheer neglect. Some clerks simply don’t check email regularly or chose not to respond.

Physical letters eliminate delivery ambiguity. A stamped letter in a clerk’s mailbox cannot be spam-filtered, cannot be ignored as easily as an email in an overflowing inbox, and creates a paper trail that email cannot match.

What the Letters Say

Each letter:

References all three prior email contacts with dates
Restates the simple request: meeting agendas and minutes for 2025–2026
Offers to accept a website link as full compliance
Asks for a brief written response if a delay is necessary
Provides our email address ([email protected]) and requests a physical mailing address for correspondence

The 14 letters are addressed to each named clerk at their town hall or published mailing address, compiled from the official Price County municipal directory. Addresses are published in full below.

Next Deadline: July 12, 2026

Allowing 7–10 days for USPS delivery and time for a response, our next checkpoint is July 12, 2026. If the 14 municipalities still have not responded by that date — after four separate attempts across two communication channels over 57 days — we will file formal complaints with the Wisconsin Department of Justice’s Office of Open Government and publish a full follow-up article.

We continue to hope that none of this will be necessary. Six municipalities responded to the first request, some within 48 hours. These are not unreasonable demands. They’re the baseline requirement of transparent government in Wisconsin.

Where Each Letter Was Sent

Municipality	Clerk	Mailing Address
Village of Kennan	Brenda Jones	N4315 Mequon St, PO Box 192, Kennan, WI 54537
Town of Catawba	Marissa Raab	W9242 US Highway 8, PO Box 112, Catawba, WI 54515
Town of Eisenstein	Elizabeth Palecek	N15664 Town Hall Road, Park Falls, WI 54552
Town of Georgetown	Kathleen Lundborg	N4254 County Road C, Prentice, WI 54556
Town of Hackett	Wendy Orysen	Prentice, WI 54556
Town of Harmony	Sheila Hook	W9095 County Road J, Catawba, WI 54515
Town of Hill	Kristin N. Torgler	N191 Soumi Road, Ogema, WI 54459
Town of Kennan	Lynn Redfall	PO Box 211, Kennan, WI 54537
Town of Knox	Jason Kivela	PO Box 1, Brantwood, WI 54513
Town of Lake	Angela Sales	W8095 County Road E, PO Box 228, Park Falls, WI 54552
Town of Ogema	Jolene Berger	W5005 State Road 86, Ogema, WI 54459
Town of Prentice	Amy Esterholm	400 Center St., Prentice, WI 54556
Town of Spirit	JaNelle Nelson	W1316 State Road 86, Spirit, WI 54459
Village of Prentice	Laurie Andreae	403 Center St., PO Box 78, Prentice, WI 54556

Update July 7, 2026: 17 of 19 Clerks Have Responded — Email Delivery Failures Confirmed

Last updated: July 7, 2026

Since publishing the June 28 update, responses have come in from multiple clerks who were previously listed as non-responsive. The picture that has emerged is notably different from what we originally reported — and it requires us to correct the framing of this story.

The Core Finding: Emails Went to Junk

Multiple clerks have now confirmed that our email requests never reached their inboxes. This was not a matter of clerks choosing to ignore lawful records requests. It was, in many cases, a matter of emails being silently filtered into junk or spam folders by consumer-grade email providers and local ISP mail systems.

Georgetown: Clerk Kathleen Lundborg responded and asked that we note the non-responses were due to junk mail filters, not clerk negligence. She spoke with two other clerks who also experienced our emails going to junk. We respect that request and want to set the record straight.

Hill: Clerk Kristin Torgler responded on July 3, stating: “We have no record of any emails from this account in any of our town emails.” She offered to make an appointment to prove no emails were received. This confirms that the email delivery failure was genuine — our messages never reached her inbox.

Flambeau: Clerk Marlene Campy responded on June 30, noting that the village posts agendas and minutes on the county website and does not maintain an email distribution list. The response was helpful and the information is now available to us through the county website.

Worcester: Clerk Regina Damjanovic responded on June 30 and added us to her email distribution list. Worcester had previously partially responded and has now fully fulfilled our request.

Eisenstein: Clerk Elizabeth Palecek responded on July 3 with the requested records attached. The request is now fulfilled.

Updated Scorecard

As of July 7, 2026:

15 of 21 Price County clerks have now responded to our records requests in some form (14 from the original 19-municipality batch, plus the Village of Prentice separately).
5 remain non-responsive: Town of Hackett, Town of Harmony, Town of Ogema, Town of Prentice, and Town of Spirit.
Of the original 13 “non-responsive” towns, the majority have now been explained by email delivery failures rather than willful non-compliance.

What This Means for the Story

We stand by the original reporting in the sense that the requests were sent and the responses were not received — that part is factually accurate. But the implication that 13 clerks were deliberately ignoring lawful public records requests was, in retrospect, unfair to many of them. The evidence now strongly suggests that a significant portion of the non-responses were caused by email infrastructure problems: junk mail filters at consumer providers, county-level mail filtering, and local ISP spam settings.

That is still a transparency problem — if a resident cannot reliably reach their clerk by email, that is a barrier to public access. But it is a different problem than clerks choosing to violate the open records law, and it demands different solutions: better email infrastructure for rural municipalities, published clerk contact methods that work, and clerk awareness of how to check junk folders.

We appreciate the clerks who took the time to respond after receiving our physical letters and follow-up emails, especially Clerk Lundborg for advocating on behalf of her colleagues and Clerk Torgler for offering to demonstrate that the emails were never received. We also want to thank the clerks who responded early and promptly — Catawba, Elk, Emery, Park Falls, and Worcester — for modeling what good municipal transparency looks like.

Remaining Non-Responsive Municipalities (as of July 12, 2026)

Town of Hackett (Clerk: Wendy Orysen)
Town of Harmony (Clerk: Sheila Hook)
Town of Ogema (Clerk: Jolene Berger)
Town of Prentice (Clerk: Amy Esterholm)
Town of Spirit (Clerk: JaNelle Nelson)

We will continue to pursue responses from these four municipalities. The July 12 deadline referenced in our June 28 update has now passed for these five remaining municipalities. If they do not respond, we will consider filing formal complaints with the Wisconsin Department of Justice — but we will do so only after exhausting all reasonable communication channels, including additional physical letters and phone calls.

We have not filed any complaint with the Wisconsin Department of Justice and continue to hope it will not be necessary for any municipality.

Update July 12, 2026: Town of Knox Responds

Last updated: July 12, 2026

Town of Knox Clerk Jason Kivela responded on July 8, 2026, providing 39 PDF attachments covering meeting agendas and minutes from January 2025 through June 2026. This fulfills our original records request for Knox. We thank Clerk Kivela for providing the records.

Updated count: 15 of 21 Price County municipalities have now responded. Five remain non-responsive: Town of Hackett, Town of Harmony, Town of Ogema, Town of Prentice, and Town of Spirit. (The original request covered 19 municipalities; the Village of Prentice and City of Phillips had separate requests.)

Update July 16, 2026: Spirit and Hackett Respond — Only 2 Remain Non-Responsive

Last updated: July 16, 2026

Two more clerks have responded, reducing the non-responsive list from 5 to 2.

Town of Spirit: Clerk JaNelle Nelson responded on July 13, 2026. She confirmed that our emails never reached her inbox — consistent with the spam filter pattern identified by other clerks. She pointed out that Town of Spirit meeting minutes are available on the Price County website at pricecounty.wi.gov/326/Town-of-Spirit. We appreciate her response and have sent her our mailing address for future correspondence.

Town of Hackett: Clerk Wendy Orysen responded on July 15, 2026. She confirmed that our emails were caught by her email provider’s spam filter. She will process our request after completing quarterly reports and audits due by the end of July, and will send hard copies via USPS with a fee schedule. We have provided our mailing address and offered to accept PDFs by email as an alternative.

Both clerks received apology emails from us after a tracking error on our end caused duplicate follow-up emails to be sent — including a statutory citation letter — before their responses were logged. We regret the error and have fixed the inbox tracking system that caused it.

Town of Prentice: An initial records request has been sent to Clerk Amy Esterholm ([email protected]). The Town of Prentice is a separate municipality from the Village of Prentice and was not included in the original May 16 batch. We are tracking this as a new request.

Updated count: 17 of 22 Price County municipalities have now responded or are in progress. Only 2 remain truly non-responsive:

Town of Harmony (Clerk: Sheila Hook) — no response to any communication across email or USPS
Town of Ogema (Clerk: Jolene Berger) — no response; town website also unreachable

The original framing of “13 towns ignored our requests” has evolved considerably. The evidence now shows that email delivery failures — not willful non-compliance — were the primary cause of non-responses. Only 2 towns out of 22 have failed to respond after every avenue of contact has been exhausted. We will continue to pursue responses from those 2 municipalities.