Salaries paid to executives at the Southeast Kansas Mental Health Center pushed those top leaders into the celebrated “1 percent” of wage earners not just in Kansas but nationwide, according to recently released tax documents for the organization.
Executive salaries within the multi-county group that includes Anderson County – which according to 2023 IRS Form 990 reports showed CEO Nathan Fawson’s $630,000 compensation package to be the highest among all 26 Kansas mental center districts. His pay as well as other top staff took a leap as much as 40 percent according to the 2024 tax filing, notching Fawson’s compensation in particular at some $889,000 annually.
The wage hikes came on the heels of significant revenue increases at SEKMHC following an advanced certification that allowed it to bill more services to Medicaid, as well as the acquisition of a private medical clinic and a dental office. County commissioners in a number of member counties defunded SEK in their 2026 budgets, saying their roughtly $90,000 apiece in local subsidy could be better spent at home if SEK could afford compensation of that caliber.
SEK’s exec salaries have been shocking to many in the six-county district that includes Anderson, Allen, Linn, Bourbon and Woodson and Neosho, and the reaction is compounded by the revelation of the 2024 raises. Those salary levels may also come under more scrutiny in the new year, since most member counties have acted to replace board members on the organization’s board of trustees – some with sitting county commissioners from those respective counties.
The issue raises the question of how prolific such “1 percenter’ salary levels are in Kansas, and from where that pay comes.
A search of Kansas state government salaries at openpayrolls.com shows the state’s last-reported highest-paid staffer to be chief investment manager Bruce Fink, who earned $402,105.76 in 2023. About 4,900 of Kansas’ 41,700 state employees earned over $100,000 per year in 2024 Move into the workforce at state universities/medical institutions and salaries of $700,000 to over $800,000 are not rare. Wichita State University Executive Vice President for Research and Industry John Tomblin made $1.1 million according to the Kansas Department of Administration; University of Kansas head basketball coach Bill Self has a 5-year, $53 million contract, making him the highest-paid public university coach in the country.
But what does it mean to be in the “top 1%” – how is the cutoff is calculated, and why does the threshold differ between Kansas and the nation as a whole?
Economists typically define the “top 1%” by ranking all earners in a given population — whether it’s the United States or a single state — and identifying the income level at which the top 1% begins. But the threshold changes dramatically depending on the group being measured.
According to a 2025 calculation of U.S. income distribution, a single earner needs about $450,100 annually to rank among the top 1% nationwide according to the financial website Don’t Quit Your Day Job. For households with more than one earner, the top 1% income threshold in 2025 is estimated at about $659,060. So whether you look at a single person or a household makes a difference. However, even on a conservative single-earner basis, crossing roughly $450,000 puts someone in the national top 1%.
When performing a similar calculation for Kansas alone, researchers estimated that the income (adjusted gross income, AGI) needed to be among the state’s top 1% is about $539,000, according to Ingram’s quoting smartasset.com data for the Kansas City area. This reflects both state-by-state income distribution and the lower overall income levels in Kansas compared with high-income states. Because Kansas has fewer high-income earners compared with wealthy coastal metro areas, the top 1% in Kansas does not require the astronomical incomes seen in New York, California, or Washington, D.C. Instead, it reflects the peak of the state’s more modest — but still substantial — income distribution.
The SEKMHC 2024 Form 990 shows several executives and physicians earning well above both the national and Kansas “1 percent” thresholds.
- CEO Nathan Fawson — $889,099
- COO/Psychologist Doug Wright — $670,522
- Urologist John Robinson — $663,147
- CFO Job Springer — $616,817
- Pediatrician — approx. $532,000
- Director of Specialty Care — approx. $517,000
- HR/Marketing Director — approx. $501,000
- Director of Family Medicine — approx. $469,000
Because these amounts are well over $450,100, they place those individuals in the top 1% of U.S. earners. And because several — particularly the CEO, COO, urologist, and CFO — exceed the roughly $539,000 state-level threshold, they also belong in the top 1% of Kansas earners.
Even those at the lower end of that group (e.g., ~$469,000–$532,000) remain near or above the national top-1% line — and well above typical incomes in southeast Kansas overall.
Per-capita personal income in many southeast Kansas counties is $50,000–$55,000 per year, according to the 2024 Regional Data Explorer at the Bureau of Economic Analysis. SEKMHC’s highest earners make 8–15 times the local per-capita income, and nearly all of them qualify as top 1% earners nationally.
Dane Hicks is a graduate of the University of Missouri School of Journalism and the United States Marine Corps Officer Candidate School at Quantico, VA. He is the author of novels "The Skinning Tree" and "A Whisper For Help." As publisher of the Anderson County Review in Garnett, KS., he is a recipient of the Kansas Press Association's Boyd Community Service Award as well as more than 60 awards for excellence in news, editorial and photography.
