— His column of August 27, next to his emails of June and July
He promised the public a point-by-point answer to the recall, and on August 27, 2026 he gave one in the Leader & Times. Every claim in it is below, next to what he had already written to the Kansas Public Employees Retirement System. We have not skipped one.
Read his column first. We would rather you did. It is online here — then come back and check it against the record.
Everything in quotation marks from him is taken from the column itself. Everything from his emails comes out of KPERS’s own files, produced by its General Counsel — and not one of those emails was sent from his county account.
The record: The petition names three parties: the Board of County Commissioners, the County Administrator, and Human Resources. His answer addresses the last two and never mentions the Board at all. Kansas law places county authority in the Board acting together at a meeting (K.S.A. 19-212), and the Kansas County Commissioners Deskbook says the same: when the Board is not in session, individual members “have no more legal authority than do private citizens.” Chairman Scott Carr told him exactly that in the meeting of July 29, 2025. Nor does he answer the designated-agent point. The County Administrator raised it with KPERS on August 12, 2025: “I am also concerned that Commissioner Stanton is not a designated agent on our account.”
There is a practical side to this that the column skips. Going to Administration or Human Resources would have settled the question in an afternoon. They held the complete file, and they proved it the moment KPERS finally asked them — three position descriptions and thirty-seven years of service history. It would also have put him in a room with the people most likely to ask where his list of KP&F employees had come from. When that question was finally put to him — on July 29, 2025, by the County Administrator, in front of the Chairman and the Sheriff — he refused to answer it.
The record: He has answered that question four times, four different ways. On June 25, 2025 he told KPERS a county employee gave him the data — “payroll (we have one payroll clerk who provided the data for recent years).” On July 28, asked by KPERS’s General Counsel how the agency would explain, in Mr. Standard’s appeal, the way it learned of the issue, he said he found it himself: “I came to learn of county funds being errantly paid at the KP&F rates… while reviewing county budget items during our budgeting process.” No employee appears anywhere in that answer. The next day, July 29, the County Administrator asked him directly, in front of the Chairman and the Sheriff, where his list came from. He refused to say — people come to him in confidence. A year later, in this column, the county employee is back. The version he gave knowing it would be repeated in that appeal is the one with no employee in it.
The record: Here he says contacting KPERS was official county business, done as a commissioner. Two sentences later he says any citizen may contact KPERS. He cannot have both. Either he acted with the authority of the office — which under K.S.A. 19-212 exists only when the full Board acts together — or he was a private citizen, in which case a state agency changed a man’s pension on a stranger’s say-so.
If it was his duty as a commissioner, it was county business. Every one of his emails to KPERS went out from todd@americanclassicrenovation.com — a private business address, not his county account. And “brought to my attention” is not what he told KPERS: on July 28, 2025 he said he found it himself, “while reviewing county budget items during our budgeting process.”
The record: Deference was never the question. On June 25, 2025 he told KPERS why she did not know: “County Admin was not informed because of concerns about how the benefits occurred in the first place.” She was the official holding the complete personnel file — the file that eventually corrected the error. He did not merely decline to seek her approval; he told a state agency he was keeping her out, and said why. By July 24 she had learned he was also asking Sheriff Gene Ward to file criminal charges against her over the same matter. The Sheriff told him he could not simply file charges, and the KPERS attorney the Sheriff consulted said there was nothing criminal in it at all.
And notice who is missing from that sentence. He names the two officials he says he does not answer to — the Administrator and the Human Resources Director. He does not name the Board. That is the omission that matters, because the Board is where a commissioner’s authority comes from in the first place: not from the office held alone, but from five members acting together in an open meeting. He was never answerable to the Administrator. He was answerable to the other four, in public.
The record: Any citizen may ask KPERS a general question. No citizen can contest a named employee’s eligibility and have the agency act on it — and KPERS acted: it reviewed Mr. Standard’s classification, changed it, and cut his retirement payment. Its General Counsel, August 12, 2025: “It was my understanding from the very beginning that Mr. Stanton was operating on behalf of the County… I would not have thought he was acting on his own; that never occurred to me.” She was not guessing: his emails are written throughout in the institutional first person — “our Emergency Management Director,” “our HR person” — and signed “Todd Stanton, Seward County Commissioner District 1.” The County Administrator answered her the same day: “Commissioner, Todd Stanton, was not acting on behalf of the Board of County Commissioners (as I understand he indicated) and has no authority as an individual commissioner to contest the retirement of a County employee.”
The record: A commissioner who believes public money is being misused has a channel: bring it to the full Board, which has its own counsel and can involve the county attorney. He used none of it. What he did instead he described to KPERS six weeks before anyone at the County knew anything. June 19, 2025: “if you determine things are in error and need correction, when you let me know notification is going to the individuals/county admin, Sheriff Gene Ward will commence an investigation as to how this occurred (and pass off to KBI if he feels that is best).” July 7: “I don’t believe the Sheriff would commence investigation on how this happened until I gave him word everything had been settled at your end.”
He wrote both of those in June and early July. KPERS had not decided anything yet, and no one at the County had been told anything at all. Two questions his column never reaches. Why was a criminal inquiry in the conversation before the retirement system had ruled on whether anything was even wrong? And why was the Sheriff in the discussion before his fellow commissioners were?
The record: The provision reads: “Each member’s account and records shall be administered in a confidential manner and specific data regarding the member shall not be released unless authorized in writing by the member.” He is right that it is aimed at KPERS rather than at him. What it tells you is what KPERS does: it does not release a member’s retirement data to anybody without that member’s written permission — not to a commissioner, and not to a newspaper.
So the comparison he draws four sentences later does not work. Nobody is getting this out of the retirement system, and he says so himself: “I obtained no records from KPERS.” Which leaves the question this column never answers. He had a list of every county employee covered by KP&F, with payroll figures going back to 2022. KPERS does not give that out. The County cannot be made to. Where did it come from?
The record: True — and it answers a charge nobody made. The petition does not say he took records from KPERS. It says he used confidential information about a county employee. He denied the accusation he was not facing.
The records went the other way. In his first email, June 12, 2025, he volunteered what he already had: “I have records of all KP&F employees with figures from payroll for 2022 thru last month but I think you would have the same data. If you need mine, I can send that to you.” He was not asking the retirement system for information — he was offering it.
Ten days before this column he put the same point a different way, at the Commission meeting of August 17, 2026: “Seward County itself sends pension contribution records to KPERS. Why would records already had by KPERS be sent to KPERS? They have these records.” KPERS did hold the County’s contribution records. It did not hold the position description — and the position description is the document the determination turned on. He attached it to his own first email: “I am attaching the County job description for our Emergency Management Director.” KPERS General Counsel told the County Administrator on August 12, 2025 that she had decided on “the position description you said you’d never seen before.”
And that is not information a commissioner has. Payroll and personnel records are held by Administration, Human Resources and payroll. An individual commissioner has no right to go into them — the Attorney General said so in 1994. Four other commissioners sat on that board, and none of them had been told. The Chairman learned of it on July 29, 2025, in the County Administrator’s office, and told him he should have brought it to the full Commission. Another of the four learned of it only when Commissioner Stanton sent her a text message; she says she did not know what he was referring to, and answered him that it belonged in front of the whole board. Nothing in the record suggests any of the four had a list of every county employee’s retirement coverage with payroll figures going back to 2022.
The record: What is open under Kansas law is an employee’s name, position, salary and length of service. Which retirement plan a particular employee is in is not on that list — it falls under the personnel-records exemption of K.S.A. 45-221(a)(4), and no one can require the County to release it. A newspaper gets records by asking the custodian and receiving what the law allows. He says he made no request and obtained nothing from KPERS. Human Resources and Administration both say no one in their departments released any such list. And even if it were public, the Attorney General answered the question in 1994: an individual commissioner may not unilaterally examine county employee records. Only the Board, at an open meeting.
The record: They did not ask. He offered — in his first email, unprompted, before anyone at the County knew he had written to them. What he described was not a budget line. It was “records of all KP&F employees with figures from payroll for 2022 thru last month.” A budget shows totals. It does not say who is in which retirement plan. Somebody assembled that list, and in more than a year he has never said who — not to the Administrator when she asked him in front of the Chairman and the Sheriff, not to the Board, not in this column.
The record: On July 7, 2025 KPERS’s General Counsel wrote to him: “I will likely write a formal letter to Mr. Standard explaining everything to him and copy you. If there’s anything you would like me to say or not say, please let me know!” His answer came the next morning: “Can you openly copy the formal letter to our HR person (who we know was not involved in how his benefits were arranged): Rosa Conley… Please send my copy bcc electronically.” That is not a man accepting an offer. It is a man giving a direction — copy Human Resources openly, blind-copy me, and nothing to the Administrator he had already told them was being kept out. When Ms. Conley telephoned KPERS after the letter arrived, she was told only that “an employee of Seward County called and asked to remain anonymous.”
The record: Every message quoted in this document was sent from todd@americanclassicrenovation.com, a private business address, and signed “Todd Stanton, Seward County Commissioner District 1.” He was not hiding from KPERS. He signed those emails with his title so a state agency would treat him as Seward County. He was hiding from Seward County. He has a Seward County email account and he uses it: on October 14, 2025 he used it to tell the County Administrator that her statements to the Board had “been shared with counsel for action.” County business conducted on the county system leaves a record any resident can ask to see. None of this did.
That was one of four steps, and every one of them had the same effect. He used the private account rather than his county address. He told KPERS the County Administrator was deliberately not being informed. He directed the County’s official notice to a junior Human Resources employee rather than to her — the one “who we know was not involved in how his benefits were arranged.” And he asked to be blind-copied on the determination letter so that his name or email address would not appear on it; when Human Resources telephoned KPERS to ask who had raised the question, they were told only that “an employee of Seward County called and asked to remain anonymous.” Four separate steps, and the result of all four was the same: Seward County could not see that its own commissioner was the one behind it.
The record: No one in the recall knew there was a second employee until he wrote it in this column — and the email came to us only afterward, from KPERS’s own files. July 8, 2025: “Once the Greg Standard issue is resolved, we need to look at [a second employee] who is also being provided KP&F though he does not meet the criteria for this.” Not a question about one man’s paperwork — a plan, stated in advance, to work down a list. Both men were found to have correctly earned what he contested. The second man is not named here: he was never told at the time, and is entitled to the privacy Mr. Standard was not given.
The record: The gun store is Greg Standard’s. What Commissioner Stanton volunteered to the state agency deciding Mr. Standard’s retirement, then, was that Mr. Standard owns a firearms business — and by his own account in this column, that is what persuaded KPERS to keep his name out of it.
Nothing in the record supports the implication. KPERS produced five email threads covering the exchanges between Commissioner Stanton and its General Counsel from June 12 to July 30, 2025. The words “gun,” “firearm” and “weapon” appear in none of them. Nothing in KPERS’s files, in the County Administrator’s notes, or in the Sheriff’s account suggests that anyone regarded Mr. Standard as a threat to anybody. He spent thirty-seven years as the man this county called in an emergency, and he owns a lawful business in it. What he sells has nothing to do with whether he earned his retirement.
The record: On July 7, 2025 KPERS told him it had put the retirement application on hold and would write a formal letter and copy him. On July 8 it told him “I’ll let you look at it before I send it,” and that the service would be recalculated to “26 of KPERS only.” He asked to be blind-copied on it. On July 28 KPERS told him Mr. Standard was appealing. Then the County produced the records, and on July 30 its General Counsel wrote to him: “My only job is to ensure Mr. Standard receives the service he has earned and that’s what I’m going to do.” That is the last message between them in everything KPERS produced. His own final message, the day before, was not about Mr. Standard’s pension at all — it was asking her to confirm or deny something the County Administrator had said about him.
No one sent him the final outcome: KPERS’s August 12 notice went to the Administrator, Human Resources, payroll, EMS staff and Mr. Standard, and no commissioner was on it. But there is the money. On July 7 he had asked when excess contributions would come back to Seward County, and there was money to come back — KP&F costs more than KPERS, so moving Mr. Standard out of it meant the County had overpaid. KPERS held that refund. Internally, the next day: “if he is successful in an appeal we may have to put him back as KP&F which would mean clawing back contributions we’d just refunded… we’re just putting both employee and employer contributions to the side for a little while.” Mr. Standard won his appeal. The refund never came. A commissioner whose stated duty is watching the County’s money, and who asked when that money would arrive, would have noticed that it never did.
The record: The only position description KPERS had was the one Commissioner Stanton sent it. Its General Counsel says so herself, writing to the County Administrator on August 12, 2025 — five weeks after the determination: “When I received the information from Mr. Stanton, along with the position description you said you’d never seen before, it was my job, then, to review the position.” The determination was made by KPERS, as he says — on one document he supplied, which the County Administrator had never seen.
The record: The County held three descriptions covering the work Mr. Standard actually did: Emergency Management Director, Advanced Emergency Medical Technician, and Fire Deputy Chief. The last two are the ones that describe riding the ambulance and commanding fire scenes. Commissioner Stanton sent one — the first — and KPERS moved twenty years of service out of the firefighter pension because that description showed “few actual ‘on-call,’ EMS-related activities.” It did not see the other two until the County Administrator sent all three on August 12. He knew the fire service existed: in the same June 12 email he wrote that “Standard was previously rural fire but that was ten or more years ago.”
The record: He described the data himself, in writing, to a state agency: “records of all KP&F employees with figures from payroll for 2022 thru last month.” Which retirement plan an individual county employee is enrolled in is exempt from mandatory disclosure under K.S.A. 45-221(a)(4). It is not something anyone can demand the County hand over, and it is not something one commissioner can go and get alone.
The record: They answer two different questions. “Intentional” describes state of mind, and it is quoted from the statute itself. “Needless” describes the outcome, and it was written after KPERS reversed. A person can act intentionally and cause harm that turns out to have been unnecessary; both are true of the same event. On intent, the record speaks for itself: he told KPERS the County Administrator was deliberately not being informed, asked to be blind-copied on the letter that went to her office, wrote throughout as though he spoke for the County while holding no authority to, has refused for more than a year to say where his list came from, and told the Administrator to her face that he would handle it the same way again.
The record: In his first message to KPERS, on June 12, 2025, he passed along this about a man he says he barely knows: “I’m told but have not verified this has been coordinated with a workman’s comp claim for carpal tunnel syndrome.” He wrote the disqualifier into his own sentence and sent it anyway, to the office deciding that man’s pension. He told the same office, as set out above, that Mr. Standard owns a gun store. He never called Mr. Standard. He never asked anyone at the County who actually knew the job what the job involved.
The record: Both are in the same email thread, two weeks apart, to the same person:
June 25, 2025: “Greg Standard has unexpectedly announced his intention to retire effective June 30 of this year. I believe he started the paperwork on that late yesterday.”
July 8, 2025: “I found out last Thursday that Mr. Standard oddly filed much of his own retirement paperwork about three weeks before he told admin he was retiring.”
“Last Thursday” was July 3. He cannot have found out on July 3 something he had already reported to her himself on June 25. And the two accounts put the filing a month apart: in the first it follows the announcement by a day; in the second it comes three weeks before it. They cannot both be true, and the one he turned into an accusation is the later one.
There is also nothing odd about the underlying fact. Employees file their own retirement paperwork, and the County helps when asked.
The record: That describes a budget process, not a grievance. Every county department was under examination that year and several were tightened. Mr. Standard took part in it the same as every other department head, and a commissioner questioning a department’s request is exactly the job — no one is being recalled for that, and this document says so plainly below. What a routine budget reduction does not explain is a private email to the state retirement system, an instruction that the County Administrator was deliberately not being informed, and a request to be blind-copied on the result.
The record: The Seward County Attorney reviewed these grounds and found them legally sufficient. Kansas law then gave him thirty days to ask a District Court to stop the recall — K.S.A. 25-4322(d). He filed nothing. Declining to test a claim while continuing to say publicly that it would have won is not evidence that it would have.
The record: None of that answers a single email. The emails quoted above are his own, written in June and July of 2025, and produced by the Kansas Public Employees Retirement System. They can be read by anyone who asks.
No one is being recalled for asking questions about county spending. That is the job, and he should do it. KPERS made a mistake too — its General Counsel said plainly that her error was not calling the County Administrator before acting, and she apologized. Greg Standard’s benefits were restored in full: all twenty years of KP&F service, the same figures KPERS’s own records had shown before Commissioner Stanton ever contacted them. Nothing he alleged survived review, about either man.
What it is about is how. There were five commissioners, a county administrator, a human resources department and a county counselor, and a Board that meets in public. He used none of them. He used a private business email account, told a state agency to keep the Administrator in the dark, and asked to be blind-copied so his name or email address would not appear on the letter that went to his own county.
Commissioner Stanton closes his column by asking about the motives of his critics. The documents do not have motives. Read them and decide.
A note on two passages. Twice above, Commissioner Stanton describes what Sheriff Gene Ward would do — that the Sheriff “will commence an investigation,” and that it would not begin until Stanton “gave him word” the KPERS side was settled. Those are Commissioner Stanton’s words to a state agency about the Sheriff’s intentions. They are quoted here because he wrote them. The Sheriff has not confirmed them, and nothing on this page should be read as saying that he did.
Sources: emails of Todd Stanton to Laurie McKinnon, KPERS General Counsel, June 12, June 19, June 25, July 7, July 8, July 28 and July 29, 2025; emails of Laurie McKinnon, June 13, June 23, June 25, July 7, July 8, July 28 and July 30, 2025; emails of Laurie McKinnon and April Warden, August 12, 2025; KPERS internal correspondence, July 2025; April Warden’s notes of July–August 2025; KPERS notice to Greg Standard, July 10, 2025; Seward County position descriptions for Emergency Management Director, Advanced EMT and Fire Deputy Chief; Todd Stanton, guest column, Liberal First, August 27, 2026; K.S.A. 19-212; K.S.A. 25-4322; K.S.A. 45-221(a)(4); K.S.A. 74-4909(10); Kansas Attorney General Opinion 1994-121; Kansas County Commissioners Deskbook (2025).
The emails, the county file and the Sheriff’s report are published in full on the evidence page. Read them and decide for yourself whether we have described them fairly.