ROBERT PIERCE

   • Leader & Times

Liberal resident Carolyn Huddleston brought the Seward County Commission more information about the county’s payroll at the board’s June 1 meeting, this time for two full years, 2024 and 2025, and one nine-week period in 2025 from Aug. 1 to Oct. 7.

“When I was looking at data for a full year, I sometimes noticed the same person listed in more than one department,” she said in the citizen comments portion of the meeting. “These people left one position, which usually needed to be filled, and they had to learn the new job. Like any other new hire, I counted them as minus one from the department they left and plus one for the department they moved to.”

Huddleston said the Seward County Jail and Sheriff’s office are separate departments, as are their pay records, and she separated detention officers out as well. As part of her research, she provided commissioners a sample page from payroll records to illustrate some of the 2025 data.

“You could see three people were paid out of that department during that year,” she said. “The year started with two.”

It was during this time, Huddleston said, when Rosa Conley, who had been working as a human resource specialist under then HR Director April Warden, also the county administrator, left the county, and Warden’s executive assistant, Hillary Franco, took that job.

“So the year also ended with two,” Huddleston said. “In the change column, it shows minus one plus one.”

Huddleston said 2024 seemed to have been a good year for county employees.

“There’d been a tax increase in 2023, and then the county voluntarily went Revenue Neutral in 2024, but still had enough money to add to reserves at the end of the year. 2024 started with 223 and ended with 228 employees,” she said. “As for turnover, we have 60 leaving and 65 new hires. That would be a loss of 20 in a four-month period on the average for that year. For the full year 2025, we start the year with 228 employees and end with 215. This time, 77 left, and there were 64 new hires, plus there was one woman who at the beginning of the year had worked 40 percent of her time in the appraiser’s office and 60 percent of her time for GIS/GEO.”

During 2025, Huddleston said this employee moved full time to the appraiser’s office, so she scored this as a minus 0.6 for the GIS/GEO department and a plus 0.6 for the appraiser’s office. With 77 employees leaving during the year, she estimated about 25 were leaving per every four months.

Examining the pay records from August 2025, Huddleston removed any employees who quit in July 2025.

“Two guys from the Oklahoma landfill last worked in July 2025,” she said. “They got paid in August, but I didn’t include them in the data. I did keep anyone who quit during August.”

Huddleston said Warden showed her organizational charts from Oct. 7, which showed every staff person, along with their job title and lines of responsibility.

“Between Aug. 1 and Oct. 7,  19 employees had left, and there were only 10 new hires,” Huddleston said. “Aug. 1 to Oct. 7 is nine weeks. Jan. 1 to April 30 is 17 weeks. If employees had continued to leave at the same rate shown in this nine-week period, that would’ve been 36 people gone in 17 weeks. More employees were decamping in this period of time than in the first four months of 2026.”

It was in July 2025, Huddleston said, constituents received a notice that their property tax was going up 30 percent, and in September 2025, a 13-mill increase over the county’s Revenue Neutral Rate was passed.

“I don’t know if the employees leaving had anything to do with those events, but the timing of this big loss of staff seems interesting,” she said. “I can tell you what our turnover has been here in the last couple of years, but I haven’t been able to find out what’s typical for other counties.”