Dunn County searching for new treasurer, county clerk
PROTECTED CONTENT
If you’re a current subscriber, log in below. If you would like to subscribe, please click the subscribe tab above.
Username and Password Help
Please enter your email and we will send you a password reset link.
By LeAnn R. Ralph
MENOMONIE — Dunn County has found itself in the position of finding candidates to appoint for county treasurer and for county clerk.
April 2 will be the last day of work for Doris Meyer, Dunn County treasurer, said Paul Miller, county manager, at the Dunn County Board’s March 17 meeting.
Meyer is “very competent and very efficient,” he said.
Unfortunately, Dunn County has not received many applications for the county treasurer position, Miller said.
Both the county clerk and the county treasurer are elected positions, and both Meyer, and Julie Wathke, Dunn County clerk, were elected to their positions for four-year terms in the November of 2020 election.
The candidates appointed to the clerk and treasurer position will serve the remainder of the terms for clerk and treasurer until the terms expire January 6, 2025.
If the appointed treasurer and clerk choose to run for their positions, they will be on the ballot in the November of 2024 election.
Wathke, of Boyceville, was appointed county clerk in October of 2013 to fill the remainder of the term left by the death earlier in the year of Marilyn Hoyt and was then first elected to the position in 2016.
Prior to becoming the county clerk, Wathke served as the clerk and then the clerk-treasurer in the Town of Sherman.
Meyer, of Colfax, was appointed as county treasurer in September of 2017 to fill the unexpired term of Dunn County Treasurer Megan Mittlestadt, who resigned in July of that year.
Meyer and Wathke both resigned, for unrelated reasons, to accept positions elsewhere, Miller said.
The plan for filling the treasurer’s position was to tentatively schedule interviews for March 25 with the Committee on Administration, he said.
The Committee on Administration would then recommend a candidate to the county board, and then the county board would appoint a treasurer at the April meeting, Miller said, noting that the plan had been to minimize the gap between Meyer leaving and a new treasurer taking the position.
“It remains to be seen if we will have a sufficient number of candidates or if we will have to push it back,” Miller said.
Wathke submitted her resignation a short while after Meyer.
“Her absence will be keenly felt,” Miller said.
While the resignation of the clerk and treasurer is a “double whammy” for Dunn County, “we do not hold it against them for moving on,” he said.
Wathke’s last day as county clerk will be April 15.
Miller said the search is on as well to find qualified candidates for the clerk’s position to present to the Dunn County Board.
If the county board is unable to fill the positions, who will assume the roles of county treasurer and county clerk? asked Gary Stene, county board supervisor from Colfax and vice-chair of the county board.
The deputy treasurer and the deputy clerk will step in “to tide us over in the interim,” Miller said.
