Caffeinated Politics

Over the past couple of years, there has been a dearth of positive news benefiting the public from the Waushara County Sheriff’s Department. Instead, there has been a bevy of truly disheartening and embarrassing stories of those who wore the uniform.

The Waushara County Sheriff’s Office promoted a deputy to K9 officer after he had been reprimanded for bad behavior, including sending and requesting lewd photos to and from colleagues and propositioning female deputies. The records state that while on duty in 2022, Matthew Elliott used a cell phone to send photos of his genitalia to fellow deputies. Two male deputies said he also asked them each at least 10 times for genitalia photos.

Waushara County Sheriff Walter Zuehlke collected thousands of dollars in county payments for his German Shepherd police dog Argo for years without continuing instruction for the dog in his care, according to an investigation by The Badger Project.

In February 2026, I posted another column making this point.

The months of inside stories and rumors running wild about sexual harassment and a hostile work environment at the Sheriff’s Office have placed this conservative rural county in the eyes of many folks across Wisconsin. The Peyton Place sheen was underscored by the Executive Summary of an investigation, which stated, “As many of the harassment concerns expressed during this investigation stemmed from consensual relationships between officers, the county may also want to consider implementing an anti-fraternization policy prohibiting romantic relationships between a supervisor and subordinate…”

You think?

On October 26, 2025, I posted a column that included this paragraph.

Given the rumors that have been rumbling for months, and then reading the recent articles in The Badger Project, it causes Waushara County residents to question what type of people get to wear a sheriff’s department uniform. I was not shocked to learn of these stories, but found it shameful that the department has such characters. And who knows how many others are left to be reported on?

On June 11th, The Badger Project answered that question by reporting on Waushara County Sheriff’s Lt. Stacy Vaccaro and former sheriff’s office Chief Deputy Jim Lietz. The title of the article said it all.

Waushara Co Sheriff’s Dept brass made $75k as small town cops, but arrested no one, wrote no tickets in 3 years

“In the final years of the Coloma Police Department, two high-ranking Waushara County Sheriff’s Department officials made nearly $75,000 total for their part-time work running the village’s law enforcement agency. Yet, between 2021 and 2024, the pair issued no citations and made no arrests, according to an investigation by The Badger Project.

Waushara County Sheriff’s Lt. Stacy Vaccaro, who worked as Coloma’s police chief from 2019 until the village closed the department in 2024, did not handle a single case for Coloma in her final three years there, despite regularly reporting on her time card that she was on patrol during the time frame. Former sheriff’s office Chief Deputy Jim Lietz, who held the title of sergeant in Coloma, was responsible for a handful of the department’s nearly 500 cases between 2021 and 2024. The Coloma Police Department’s other part-time cops handled the rest.

Records from the village of Coloma and Waushara County, obtained and analyzed by The Badger Project, raise questions about the effectiveness of the moonlighting sheriff’s department officials in the roughly 450-person village that hugs Interstate 39 and follows a series of scandals related to the local sheriff’s office in central Wisconsin.

The records show that Vaccaro and Lietz did not issue a citation or arrest anyone between 2021 and 2024. Lietz, the sergeant, was responsible for 21 of the department’s 477 cases during this time period. The police department in nearby Hancock, a comparably-sized village north of Coloma along the interstate, had more than 1,300 cases between 2021 and 2024, and its part-time police sergeant handled 120 of them, according to records obtained by The Badger Project.

In Coloma, Vaccaro’s monthly timecards between 2021 and 2024 show that she regularly reported working “admin/patrol” hours. However, department records do not list Vaccaro as having handled a single traffic stop, ordinance violation, or 911 call. In a 30-month period between June 2022 and December 2024, when she reported working more than 1,500 hours for Coloma, Vaccaro notified dispatch that she was working and available to take calls 14 times, according to radio logs obtained by The Badger Project. These instances occurred when she worked Coloma’s annual Chicken Chew, Christmas parade, and during Halloween trick or treating in 2023.

Between 2021 and 2024, Vaccaro and Lietz’s salaries and benefits cost Coloma more than $123,000, according to records. Lietz resigned from the sheriff’s office in October 2025.”

What I find fascinating about this series of stories is that they come from a mostly rural, highly conservative county. There’s a deep and persistent irony in how such places and people present themselves as champions of fiscal discipline and personal responsibility, even as their actual operations and behavior often reveal the opposite. The gap between the conservative rhetoric and “core” values, administrative procedures, and personal ethics and morals is stunning to see play out. And it is all funded by taxpayers.

Much of this contradiction is structural rather than malicious in the sheriff’s department. There is supremely poor leadership and a lousy dose of personal responsibility. But the cultural identity in Waushara County of being conservative and fiscally constrained for the betterment of all is a horrible joke that even now, the majority of residents should be able to see is patently false.