Vilas County District Attorney Karl Hayes said he made it clear to Preque Isle Town Chair Al Eschenbauch that continued noncompliance with Wisconsin Open Records Law will result in legal action.
An article in the Jan. 16, 2026 issue of The Lakeland Times in Minocqua covered the issue. According to the article:
“I made it clear that if this matter is not resolved to my satisfaction on or before Friday 01/30/26, I will file a petition for mandamus in Vilas County Circuit Court on Monday 02/02/26,” Hayes wrote in a Jan. 9 email to Lakeland Times publisher Gregg Walker.
The ultimatum comes nearly a year after the newspaper requested the records and months after the town’s own attorney advised that the request was legal and should be fulfilled.
The Times first made its open records request on Feb. 4, 2025. The request sought all public records and correspondence related to the Presque Isle investigation of town computers, including all reports prepared by SIFT, the computer forensics firm hired in 2023; any and all preliminary and final reports; and any and all correspondence between town officials, SIFT, and outside individuals regarding the investigation.
The town responded a week later, but provided only a single SIFT invoice and a two-page summary of findings that had been read aloud at a town board meet- ing earlier in January.
No additional records were released, and in August the newspaper filed an open records complaint against the town with the Vilas County sheriff’s department, asking the department to investigate why the records hadn’t been turned over.
By Jan. 9, when Eschenbach met with Hayes, there were still no records. In his email to Walker following that meeting, Hayes wrote that he explained the town’s obligations under the open records statutes and provided Eschenbauch with a paper copy of the relevant statutory provisions.
“The stumbling block appears to be the cost of hiring a person with the necessary skills to locate/com- pile records on one of the laptops in question, and then who would bear that cost,” Hayes wrote to Walker. “I reminded him that I had previously sent him the DOJ open records fee schedule on 10/28/25. I discouraged him from focusing on charges and costs, as that approach can tend to defeat the purpose of the open records law.”
The Jan. 30 deadline was firm, Hayes wrote.
