RecallStanton.com · Seward County, Kansas
The Thousand-Hour Rule
The case against Greg Standard rests on a number. The number is real, it is in the Kansas statute — and it is a condition of the job, not a tally of the man.
One claim, examined. This page does nothing but take a single argument seriously and check it against the law it appeals to. The recall case is on
The Record. The man it was done to is on
Thirty-Seven Years.
From the broadcast
“you have to do this for a thousand hours before you can qualify for KP&F. That’s their rules. And this person hadn’t been doing that.”
Earl Watt, publisher of the Leader & Times, on High Plains News Today, September 21, 2026, at 1:08:34, describing what he says a whistleblower told Commissioner Stanton. Transcribed from the broadcast; the automatic transcript renders KP&F as “KPNF.”
That is the case against Greg Standard, stated as plainly as it has ever been stated. A rule exists. He did not meet it. Everything else follows from that.
So we went and read the rule. It is real, it is short, and it does not ask what he thinks it asks. It is a question about the job — whether the position is a genuine, year-round one — and not a question about the man who held it.
What the statute actually says
There is no EMT test in the law. There is no EMT anything.
K.S.A. 74-4952 is the section that decides who is in Police and Fire. It defines two things: “fireman” and “police.” The words “emergency medical technician,” “EMT,” “EMS,” “paramedic” and “ambulance” do not appear in it anywhere.
From the broadcast
“even if you’re an EMT or something that gets it, it’s only when you put in a thousand hours of EMT work and other things.”
Earl Watt, September 21, 2026, at 1:01:59.
There is no such thing as a thousand hours of EMT work under this statute, because the statute has no EMT standard to put hours against.
The thousand hours is a condition of the job. Not a tally of the man.
The figure is real and it is in the law. Here it is, in the definition of who counts as an employee for Police and Fire purposes. Read the verb.
From the statute
“whose employment for police or fireman purposes is not seasonal or temporary and requires at least 1,000 hours of work per year”
K.S.A. 74-4952(4). Emphasis added.
“Requires” describes the position. It asks whether the job is a real, year-round one rather than seasonal or casual work. It does not ask a person to produce a scorecard. The same sentence governs a sheriff’s deputy in exactly the same words — so has any deputy in Kansas ever been asked to total up his hours to stay in Police and Fire?
And if anyone wants the arithmetic: a thousand hours a year works out at about twenty hours a week. Greg Standard’s own account of his job is fifty-plus hours a week for the whole of his employment, on call the rest of the time. He clears the number more than twice over. He simply never had to — because the number was never about him.
What the statute does ask — and it asks the County, not the employee.
For service on and after July 1, 1998 there are four elements. Two of them are not facts about a person at all. They are acts of government.
From the statute
“specifically designated, appointed, commissioned or styled as such by the governing body… and certified to the retirement system as such”
K.S.A. 74-4952(11). Emphasis added.
In Seward County the governing body is the Board of County Commissioners — five people, sitting together, in public. Certification is the County’s own act, made to KPERS. Neither is something an employee does, and neither is something one commissioner does alone.
Which turns the whole question around. If the County designated the position and certified it to the State, then a single commissioner wrote privately to Topeka asking it to undo his own Board’s act — without telling the Board.
His own broadcast conceded the standard five days earlier
September 16, 2026
He read the right answer out on air, agreed with it, and moved on.
Reading a viewer’s comment on the same programme, five days before the thousand-hour claim:
From the broadcast
“eligibility for KP&F is driven by the actual position’s duties and legal classification, but the job description is only one of the key pieces you determine that.”
A viewer comment, read aloud and agreed with by Earl Watt on High Plains News Today, September 16, 2026, at 10:45.
Duties and legal classification. A job description is only one of the pieces. He said so himself — and Commissioner Stanton had sent the State exactly one job description, out of the three the County held.
And the body that administers the rule has already ruled
- KPERS cut twenty years of Greg Standard’s service on one job description — one of three, sent by a commissioner, and one the County Administrator had never seen.
- The other two reached KPERS five weeks after the decision.
- Once it had the complete record, KPERS restored the full twenty years of KP&F and six years of KPERS.
- The thousand-hour argument was available to KPERS the whole time. It is their statute. They restored the service anyway.
What would settle it for good
Two ordinary public records, neither of them privileged, would end this argument permanently: the Board’s designation of which positions are covered by Police and Fire, and the County’s certifications to KPERS. They are dispositive in a way no job description can be, because they are the two things the statute actually asks for.
If the rule is a thousand hours, why did KPERS — whose rule it is — reinstate his full retirement?
Sources. Statute: K.S.A. 74-4952, read from the Kansas Office of the Revisor of Statutes. Broadcast quotations: High Plains News Today, September 16 and September 21, 2026, recorded and retained; timestamps are given so anyone can listen for themselves. The KPERS determination, the three position descriptions and the restoration of service are set out on The Record, in the chronology and in the evidence index.