ROBERT PIERCE

   • Leader & Times

Figures recently released about the number of people employed at Seward County have been disputed by some.

One number in particular caught the attention of some community members when Administrator April Warden said the county at one time employed 250 people, adding that number was down to 209 at the end of April.

Liberal resident Carolyn Huddleston said at the May 18 commission meeting, she has been researching the county’s turnover from Jan. 1 to April 30, and while she found a few listed on the payroll twice, the number of lost personnel since the start of the year still equals 28 as Warden claimed at an April meeting.

Huddleston said all of these people did leave, but she believes one of them never actually worked for the county.

“This man only had about 109 hours total,” she said. “You’d expect a full-time person to have 160 hours in two pay periods. This man’s actual work time is less than one hour in those four weeks, which suggests to me an exit interview. In any case, records for the next pay period don’t show him as an employee. I think it’s pretty clear this guy was never on the job working in 2026, so I excluded him from data.”

Huddleston said she also found a volunteer firefighter was listed as a part-time employee, and she said if part-time employees were included on the payroll, the 209 total Warden said the county had as of April 30 would have been much higher.

“That man doesn’t belong in this group either,” Huddleston said of the volunteer firefighter. “If we remove those two, we have 26, not 28 full-time employees who left their jobs with the county between Jan. 1 and April 30.”

Further, Huddleston discovered three of the employees lost were economic development staff transferred to the City of Liberal’s payroll.

“These three employees were subtracted off the county payrolls, and they are part of the minus 26 on my summary sheet,” she said. “These people are still doing work for the county as well as the city, and I don’t think they should be counted if we’re trying to verify an employee hemorrhage. That means 23, not 26 full-time people we don’t want to see going who left the county in four months.”

Huddleston said the best data from 2024 showed 60 employees, which would amount to an average of 20 for a four-month period, and while her numbers showed the county starting the year with 215 full-time employees, her numbers did agree with Warden’s, which showed a current number of 209 working for the county.

“However, the start number of 215 is deceptively low because the commission was three members down at the start of 2026,” Huddleston said. “If the commission had been at their normal number, it would’ve been 218 employees going down to 209 in four months, which to me makes that drop seem like more. That is nine unfilled positions, but we can’t forget about those economic development staff.”

Huddleston said she feels these three staff members were lost on purpose.

“It wasn’t really nine, but six unfilled positions, or did the county want some of those positions to remain open too back in September?” she said. “April eliminated 18 positions. Some of these were positions that hadn’t been filled in some time, but others did have someone in them during 2025, but weren’t to be filled again. Some decline in the number of employees since the start of ’25 has been by design. I believe there were 228 full-time employees at the beginning of 2025, and that dropped to 213 by Oct. 1, according to April.”

Huddleston later pointed to an e-mail from Warden published in the Leader & Times in which the administrator indicated good candidates were available for at least one position, but county leaders chose not to hire anyone.

“It’s unclear how many employees there would be if good applicants are brought on board,” Huddleston said.

After Huddleston finished her comments, Warden attempted to clarify the numbers, and she said there is more to the statistics than meets the eye.

“When we talk about the numbers they were talking about and even though we include economic development people, I don’t think people realized what went into that transition,” Warden said. “We have to do an exit interview. We had to take those people off of our payroll. We are still working with legal for the resolution and the interlocal agreement. There’s a lot that goes into somebody leaving somebody coming besides just seeing the numbers we want to talk about.”

Warden said the numbers she sent Huddleston indicate 32 people left and 22 were hired for a total of 54.

“We were able to lose some and gain some, but I want commissioners and constituents to understand what we go through when that happens,” Warden said. “There’s a drug and alcohol test that costs $81.50 per employee. There’s also the Clear Company background. We have a package deal on it. I’m working on getting the cost of every background check we have to do. There are changes that have to take place in payroll.”

These changes, Warden said, include benefits such as those from the Kansas Public Employee Retirement System, Kansas Police and Firemen’s Retirement System, iMed, Advance Life Insurance, Blue Cross Blue Shield, Aflac Wellness and Fuel Man.

“Some of them have credit cards, so we order them a card, and we’re deleting a card,” she said. “Some of them have cell phones. Some of them have vehicles. We make a badge for every person who comes and goes to be able to get in and out of the county.”

Warden said part of the county’s expenses for employees also includes key cards, uniforms, and radios, and all of this must be recollected upon the employee leaving the county. She also mentioned training, which she said is a complete loss when a staff person is lost.

“As Carolyn pointed out, sometimes these employees aren’t staying for more than a day, a week, a month,” she said. “We also have to do onboarding. Those employees go through sexual harassment training and getting to know our handbook. We also have Compliance One. We also have our employee assistance program.”

Other expenses include entering the employee into the county’s human resources system and exit interviews through Cobra.

“The other benefits we are required to go over with them, it has to set them up,” Warden said. “Every employee has an e-mail, and we have to go in and delete that or figure out if we need to maintain that because that person might be getting e-mails that someone has to look at. We set them up and execute time and timekeeping. They’re set up in CIC. We have two different payrolls. We also have a Sage payroll for our Oklahoma employees.”

Warden said these are just some of the things she could think of as she listened to Huddleston’s remarks.

“I don’t think anybody understands what it takes to hire somebody and what it takes to exit someone and everything that is included,” Warden said. “It is a significant cost to the county when this is happening.”