Outgoing Wausau Mayor Katie Rosenberg says she knew it would be a close race.
“Wausau is a purple city in a red county in a swing state,” said Rosenberg. “No matter what happens pretty much every election through November is going to be close here. We expected it.”
While the Mayor’s and all other municipal races are technically non-partisan, no one should be surprised by her analogy. In the weeks leading up to Tuesday’s vote spending on both candidate’s behalf shot up by six figures, much of which came from the state Democratic party on Rosenberg’s behalf. Republican money also poured into the race for challenger Doug Diny.
Rosenberg, who authorized the ads, said she didn’t want the race to become about right versus left or red versus blue, but felt she needed to defend her record. “Overwhelmingly, I felt like I had to do that. We were getting outspent, so that was the antidote. It didn’t quite work the way that we wanted it to, but that’s politics.”
She counts the city’s efforts to clean up PFAS contamination from its drinking water as her biggest accomplishment, but she also knows that the way the response caused the city’s water bills to explode likely led to her downfall.
“[While knocking on doors] I could hear it from people. But, what do you do? You do the right thing. I would rather do the right thing and lose than do the wrong thing and win,” said Rosenberg.
She added that sweeping the elevated PFAS levels under the rug wasn’t an option in her mind. “When you see a problem, you have to fix it. That’s what I believe.”
Diny will take the oath of office on Tuesday, April 16th. Rosenberg will oversee one meeting of the lame-duck City Council on April 9th. Rosenberg says she will take some time to decompress and evaluate options before making her next career move, saying she will be doing “some cool things.” She adds that she has no appetite for another political race.
“I’ll leave that to the professionals,” added Rosenberg.
