Dehydrated 0.7.1 -- Directory Permissions?

My LetsEncrypt certificate expired (Slackware 15.0 / Apache). :(

I suspect that the February 8 upgrade for Dehydrated (to 0.7.1) reset permissions on some files or folders. Here is what I see when I run certificate renewal manually:

Code:root:/etc/dehydrated# /usr/bin/dehydrated -c
# INFO: Using main config file /etc/dehydrated/config
# INFO: Running /usr/bin/dehydrated as mkeating/wheel
# INFO: Using main config file /etc/dehydrated/config
ERROR: Directory /etc/dehydrated for LOCKFILE /etc/dehydrated/lock is not writable, aborting.I tried making /etc/dehydrated writeable for the wheel group, but that had no impact.

Any suggestions?

Thanks!