The Dane County Board of Supervisors district 28 sits in the northwest corner of Dane County, containing the villages of Cross Plains, Mazomanie, and Blue Mounds.
The two candidates running for the rural seat are incumbent Michele Doolan and competitor Bill Brosius.
Doolan is finishing up her first term as Supervisor, after first being elected to the seat in 2020 where she ran unopposed. Doolan also ran for governor in 2018, but lost in the democratic primary.
Doolan currently works as a teaching assistant at the Paul Mitchell School, a cosmetology and barber school in Madison, after having to retire from being a hairdresser due to being diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in 2016. She says that her time as a hairdresser has made her a unique asset to the Dane County Board.
“I made a career of communicating with people, and finding a way to solve people’s problems and reading between the lines, helping people be happy with their appearance, which is not a small thing. I think that makes me uniquely suited to do the work that I do on the County Board because you spend about 75% listening and 25% talking,” Doolan says.
Brosius declined to talk with WORT about his election campaign, and has said very little about his platform. He has served as a village trustee in the Village of Cross Plains for the last seven years, and holds a masters degree in business administration from Cardinal Stritch University.
Brosius has received the endorsement of one current board member: Dave Ripp of Waunakee. The conservative leaning Ripp recently voted to overturn Dane County’s mask mandate, along with supervisors Tim Kiefer, Tim Rockwell, and Jeff Weigand, according to the WKOW. Brosius has also made several donations to the Dane County GOP, and former President Donald Trump, according to the Wisconsin State Journal.
Brosius told the Wisconsin State Journal that there is no one single issue that he sees as most vital to the folks of his district, and that each town and village has its own priorities.
Doolan also says that there are a large array of issues concerning her district. She says that rural broadband is a major issue in her area, especially after the pandemic. She says that, while many schools were upset that they had to move to virtual learning over the pandemic, she understands that one of the largest barriers that faced students was the lack of reliable internet to help their learning.
Doolan says she is also passionate about helping to revitalize the local economy’s in her district, and make the small towns in her district less reliant on Madison.
“…and then for economic sustainability, we need to revitalize the main streets in our areas. We don’t want to just be bedroom to Madison. Of course, we have a wealth of resources really close by because we have Madison, but we really want to be committed to local commerce as much as we can, so I want to make sure we don’t tear down too many little stores to put up condos around here,” Doolan says.
In a Q&A with the Wisconsin State Journal, Brosius says that he is committed to helping the people of his district through his experience as a village trustee. He says that, if elected, he would represent the district without bias, answering only to the people in rural Dane County.
Doolan says that she is passionate to continue serving her community and giving a voice to the people who feel unheard compared to the city of Madison.
“I guess when I ran two years ago, the thing was when I was canvassing, ‘Parisi doesn’t care about us out here, the County Board doesn’t care, they care about Madison.’ It was my mission to figure out how that works, why there is that perception. It’s not that people don’t care, it’s that people don’t really understand what it’s like out here. It’s the difference between being rural and being urban, and since I’ve lived in both areas, I can kind of understand that and I am staunchly committed to representing my district,” Doolan says.
The 2022 spring election takes place on April 5th.
Photo courtesy: Dane County Board of Supervisors
