The documented conduct of Seward County Commissioner Todd Stanton, District 1 — July 2025 through August 2026.
Englewood was being evacuated and homes were burning to the ground. One commissioner was out fighting it on a tractor. Another spent days making sure the crews had water. Rural Fire is Todd Stanton’s own assignment, and that is his fire chief on the other end of the line. Thirty-six seconds. Press play.
Homes were burning to the ground. That is Todd Stanton laughing about keeping the county’s own administration in the dark. What is the joke?
What was good about anything the Fire Chief was doing on that phone? He said it twice.
The recall petition against Commissioner Stanton rests on one thing: what he did to Greg Standard's retirement. That is the legal question, the County Attorney found it sufficient, and nothing on this page is part of it. This page exists because people keep asking the same question after they read that record — was this one bad decision, or is this how he operates?
Everything below has a date and a document behind it. Where the source is one person's contemporaneous notes rather than a record you could request yourself, it says so, so you can weigh it accordingly. Where something is disputed, it says that too. We have left several things out on purpose, and there is a section at the end explaining what and why.
In June and July of 2025 Commissioner Stanton contacted the state retirement system about a 37-year county employee's pension. He did not bring it to the Board. He told KPERS in writing that the County Administrator was deliberately not being informed — “County Admin was not informed because of concerns about how the benefits occurred in the first place” — and asked the agency to blind-copy him on the letter that went to his own county, so his name or email address would not appear on it. Greg Standard's first retirement check was cut by more than 25 percent. After the County supplied complete records, KPERS restored everything. Nothing he alleged survived review.
Source: Stanton's own emails to KPERS General Counsel, June 12 – July 29, 2025, produced by KPERS. The full record is on the chronology page.
On October 14, 2025 the County Administrator sent the Board a factual notice about a zoning matter involving Commissioner Stanton's own business. Within hours he replied — from his county email account — “Your factually challenged statements below have been shared with counsel for action.” A county administrator informing her board is the job. His answer was a threat of legal action against her for doing it.
Source: Stanton email, October 14, 2025, 6:28 PM.
Three weeks earlier, when the Planning & Zoning Director and a colleague telephoned him as a courtesy — rather than simply mailing the violation letter — he told them they had been “provided false information,” directed them to his attorney, said the call was “inappropriate as hell,” and hung up. The County issued a Notice of Violation on October 15, 2025 for operating retail activity in a rural residential district without a conditional use permit. Through counsel he denied any violation and warned that enforcement would “cost the tax payers of Seward County tens of thousands of dollars.” The case is still open in the County's system.
Sources: Notice of Violation, October 15, 2025; letter from his attorney, November 3, 2025; County iWorQ case record #38; County Administrator's emails to the Board, October 14–15, 2025.
A county employee told the Administrator of fearing being “the next target” and not wanting to be in the middle of it. The Administrator wrote to the Board: “Doing our jobs should not put us in the cross hairs, but it certainly has.”
Source: County Administrator's emails to the Board, October 14–15, 2025.
He had already accused the Administrator of granting improper raises. The raises were properly documented and the accusation was unfounded. Separately, he asked the Sheriff to file criminal charges against her over the retirement matter. The Sheriff told him he could not simply file charges, and the KPERS attorney the Sheriff then consulted said there was nothing criminal in it at all — a clerical error of the kind that arises over retirement classifications.
Source: the County Administrator's contemporaneous notes, July–August 2025. These are her own written record rather than a county document you could request — but they are not the only account. Three county officials who were in the July 29, 2025 meeting, including the Commission Chairman, have each confirmed that Commissioner Stanton asked for charges to be filed against the Administrator. The Sheriff has not been asked on the record.
On the Leader & Times Facebook Live broadcast of October 7, 2025, Commissioner Stanton said he had moved his retail business from its Liberal storefront to his rural property “out in the country, where the sales tax is less.” He said it on air, as a sitting commissioner, while publicly assigning blame for the County's budget shortfall.
Sources: the October 7, 2025 broadcast, quoted in the County Administrator's October 14 email to the Board; his own posted signage and website.
He submitted mileage reimbursement for the 68-mile round trip to Liberal for county meetings. He already made that drive Wednesdays, Thursdays and Fridays to open his own business in town. A county employee asked to approve it was uneasy enough to pull an Attorney General opinion establishing that whether to pay mileage is the Board's call, and told him that for meetings where he is not the designated commission liaison he should not be submitting mileage at all.
Source: the County Administrator's contemporaneous notes.
On December 15, 2025 a sheriff's deputy was called to a County Commission executive session after Commissioner Stanton got into the face of Commissioner Persephoni Fuller and pointed his finger at her. She told the deputy she was afraid. She asked that no charges be filed and that the Sheriff simply speak to him about how he speaks to women. Commissioner Stanton acknowledged telling her to “watch your mouth” while holding his finger up at the level of her face. The Sheriff told him he could not speak to her that way. He was not the only one who saw it. The next day the County’s Information Technology Director wrote to Sheriff Ward, unprompted: “I did witness Todd Stanton point his finger in the face of Persephoni Fuller upon exiting the commission executive session room and entering into the meeting room to return to their seats at the commission bench.” He pointed the Sheriff to the County’s own video of that meeting.
Sources: Seward County Sheriff's Office Incident Report 25SO06392, December 15, 2025 — a public record, quoted here only as to Commissioner Stanton's own conduct and his own admission; and the County Information Technology Director's email to Sheriff Ward, December 16, 2025, contained in the same report.
On February 17, 2026, during an active wildfire response, the Rural Fire Chief called Commissioner Stanton from his truck. The chief said that when the fire was out he was finished — “I quit” — and that county officials “can all kiss my ass.” The commissioner's answer, while the fire was still burning, was “I understand that 100 percent… make sure you send them a picture so they can kiss it.” Earlier in the same call the chief complained about the County Administrator wanting radio access to his operations, and the commissioner answered, “Good man. Good man.”
Source: truck-camera recording from the Fire Chief's vehicle, February 17, 2026, published on the Leader & Times Facebook page. Transcribed from the recording; the recording itself is public and anyone can listen to it.
Any one of these could be explained. A bad week, a misunderstanding, a dispute that looked different from the inside. What is hard to explain is the shape they make together: county staff who say doing their jobs put them in the cross hairs, a department head encouraged to walk off mid-wildfire, two separate demands for criminal charges or legal action against the administrator, a deputy called to a commission meeting, and a 37-year employee's pension cut on one document he supplied alone.
Read the record on the retirement first. That is what the recall is about. This page is only here to answer the question people ask afterward.
Read that record first. It is the case, it is what the County Attorney found sufficient, and it stands on its own.