Five Answers

A payroll clerk gave it to me.

Writing privately to the lawyer handling the matter at KPERS, he named a source inside the County.

There was no clerk. It came up in the budget.

KPERS asked him a specific question: how should the agency explain to an administrative judge how it came to learn of this? His answer named nobody at all.

Thirty-three days. Same agency, same lawyer. The clerk had vanished — and this was the version written to be repeated to a judge.

Asked to his face, he would not say at all.

The next day, in the County Administrator’s office. Commission Chairman Scott Carr was in the room. Sheriff Gene Ward was called in. He admitted he was holding a list of the County’s Police and Fire employees. Asked where he got it, he declined to answer. Carr told him a single commissioner had no authority to do any of this. He said he would do it the same way again.

One day after telling the State it had come out of the budget process, asked in person by the three people with the most right to know, he answered nothing.

It is a public record. Anyone can get it.

A year later, in his own column in the Liberal First, the account changed again: there was no confidential source to protect, because the document was one any member of the public could have asked for. We would rather you read it in his words than ours — the column is linked in the sources below.

If anyone could have walked in and asked for it, there was never a confidence to keep.

Someone inside the county brought it to him.

On his weekday broadcast, Leader & Times publisher Earl Watt gave a fifth account — not Commissioner Stanton’s own words, but an account given on his behalf, fourteen months after the first one.

Which is close to the June 2025 answer, and flatly against the one that has been given in public all year.

He told the same agency two different things, five weeks apart.

On June 25 a named role inside the County had handed him the data. On July 28 — asked how the State should explain the matter’s origin to a judge — it had come to him in the ordinary course of looking at the budget, and no employee was mentioned. Both were written to KPERS. Both are in the production.

A year on, in his column, it became a record anyone could have asked for. Then, in September, it became a whistleblower again. Four of those five cannot survive each other.

“Anyone could get it” is only a defence if it is true.

Kansas law opens a public employee’s name, position, salary and length of service. Which retirement plan a person is enrolled in is not on that list — K.S.A. 45-221(a)(4). And what he told KPERS he was holding was not one record. It was every KP&F employee in the County, with individual payroll figures, going back three years.

If a county insider handed that over, then it was never an open-records transaction at all — and a single commissioner may not go into county personnel records on his own. That is Attorney General Opinion 1994-121. It goes to the Board, in open session. That is not what happened.

This is the second question he has answered more than three ways.

Whether he asked the Sheriff to bring criminal charges against the County Administrator has three accounts of its own — it did not come out of his mouth, then it was a false statement, then he most certainly did say it, only not about her. Two of those are on the County’s own video. That one is set out in full on the Questions page.

Two things we will say out loud

He has not been charged with anything, and we do not say he has. And a commissioner asking questions about how Seward County spends its money is doing his job — that part is not in dispute and never has been.

The question on this page is narrower, and he raised it himself by answering it five times: where did he get three years of county payroll records, and under what authority?