ROBERT PIERCE
• Leader & Times
As Seward County’s Fiscal Year 2026 budget, which called for an increase of more than 14 mills over the Revenue Neutral Rate, continues to be at the forefront of local conversation, so too do discussions of the Seward County Health Department’s handling of grant money.
Monday, county commissioners approved a new grant funds approval and implementation workflow procedure presented by SCHD Director Brie Greeson for handling grants from the Kansas Department of Health and Environment.
Before the item was presented, though, in the meeting’s citizens comments item, Liberal resident Carolyn Huddleston brought a few suggestions to be added to Greeson’s procedure.
“The health department director should make known to the commission if she is wanting to request any grant funds to be used as bonuses and get that approved by the board before beginning to write the application,” Huddleston said as she stated her suggested changes to one of the points in the policy. “After having written the application, it seems important this be submitted to the board so you can review how much is going to be required in matching funds.”
Huddleston said Greeson had previously claimed no county money had been used for staff bonuses, but her research had revealed otherwise.
“To check this out, I considered the Maternal and Child Health grant application Fiscal Year 2026,” Huddleston said. “By her request for $45,000 in bonus money, Brie did put zero for county matching, but there’s more to the story.”
Furthermore, Huddleston said research showed the county is required to put in at least 40 percent in matching funds to secure this grant.
“You can see Brie actually requested $156,550,” she said. “For a grant award of that amount, if the county put in the minimum, 40 percent of matching funds, that would be $62,620, but they put in $179,127, which is almost three times the minimum required. $128,000 of this is for salaries and $40,000 for benefits. Brie only asked the grant would pay $55,000 toward salaries and zero for benefits. The grant pays $55,000 in salaries, while Seward County pays $128,000. The grant pays zero for benefits, and Seward County pays $40,000. If Brie had shifted over that $45,000 in bonus money, the grant could’ve covered $100,000 on the salary total, while the county could’ve dropped their matching for salaries to $83,252, and the total for county matching funds would’ve dropped to $134,000, which is still more than twice as much is necessary to secure the grant.”
Shifting bonus money to salaries, Huddleston said, would have saved the county $45,000 in matching funds and freed up that money.
“It would no longer be tied to the MCH grant and could be used anywhere in the health department,” she said. “Some or all of this money could be pulled out of the health department and could be used elsewhere in the county.”
SCHD has staff committed to home visits, and money for that budget is a separate entry from MCH, which Huddleston said is somewhat confusing.
“Going to the women’s homes is separated out from the services provided when they get there, which would be the MCH component,” she said. “This makes it look like the only pay these staff get for home visiting is their bonuses, but that isn’t the case. They’re billing pretty much the same number of hours for WIC as everybody else.”
Huddleston said Greeson also claimed staff were performing tasks on evenings and weekends they were not billing for, and this is what Greeson also claimed justified the bonuses.
“If there truly are extra activities that further objectives from this grant that are being performed outside of their regular work hours, those activities can be included in billable hours,” Huddleston said. “I certainly want staff to be paid for work they’re doing.”
Furthermore, Huddleston said no discussion of giving bonuses took place in any commission meeting since 2022, which she verified from meeting minutes from County Clerk Stacia Long.
“She only found three sets of minutes that had anything to do with the health department grants, and those all concerned WIC funding,” Huddleston said.
Huddleston said the only way to make sure Greeson and future SCHD directors brings information to the commission and the public was to make it a requirement in the grant workflow process.
“The time for Brie to get permission for bonuses is before she writes the grant application,” she said.
Huddleston said however, this still may not be enough to correct the problem.
“If she comes in and says she has an opportunity to use some grant money for bonuses and the benefits wouldn’t cost Seward County anything, people might want to jump right on board,” she said. “This is exactly what Brie was saying, but the truth is the complete opposite. Seward County paid the entire cost of these bonuses because they had to up their matching funds by $45,000 to cover salaries and benefits when that money was put into bonuses. How could anyone figure that out unless they saw the grant application?”
Greeson said she had been following the process taught to her by former SCHD Director Martha Brown, and when she realized the health department did not have a formal written procedure on how to handle grant funds, she felt moving forward it was important to establish a clear standardized procedure to guide the process.
“My goal is to always be fully transparent, and I will ensure the commission is fully informed of all grant deliverables as they become available,” she said. “This procedure also helps ensure the public has multiple opportunities to see and understand the work we do.”
Greeson said attorneys with the county’s law firm, Foulston Siefkin of Wichita, requested adding commission approval as a motion to submit grant applications with approval as a commission decision authorizing commissioners to sign the application.
“We also added to provide a summary sheet outlining the program,” she said. “The program is deliverables that are known at the time.”
While many have suspected a lack of transparency on the part of the health department, as well as the county as a whole, Greeson said SCHD will have much more transparency moving forward.
“My goal has never been to be dishonest in anything,” she said. “I have never had the intention to do anything incorrectly, and that is evidenced by this procedure so we have something moving forward so the public can see that.”
Administrator April Warden said the county has followed the same practice with SCHD’s grant funding for many years.
“It’s been said Martha Brown came with memorandums of understanding,” she said. “At budget times, when you guys are told about the grants, some of those grants have been in place since the ’90s.”
Those grants, Warden said, fund health department programs.
“Those have never been brought back to the commissioners for approval once you approve the budget,” she said. “In your packet at budget time, the bonuses were noted and were very specifically spelled out. Those were approved at that time. She works in three different budget years, and it’s never been a practice of the commission to have those grants brought back.”
Warden also said Greeson’s predecessors did not have any other methods for handling grants.
“That’s the way she was trained,” she said. “That’s the way we’ve always done it. That’s why Stacia can find no previous records, because it’s never been done that way.”
