At the Alfalfa County commissioners' regular monthly meeting, county clerk Laneta Schwerdtfeger started off the meeting with an enormous pile of paperwork for the commissioners to sign, primarily M&O warrants for payments, purchase orders and other routine matters of business. For more than 20 solid minutes, Marvin Woodall, Jay Hague and Mike Roach signed their names to paper-clipped bundles of papers, largely in silence, broken by the occasional joke. Even as business got further underway, the commissioners continued signing more paperwork.

The board approved the following:

construction manag...