Iola’s policies regarding past-due utility payments sparked Georgia Masterson to run for City Council.
Masterson is co-founder and interim executive director of Humanity House, a non-profit that helps impoverished residents through a number of means, such as food or utility assistance.
Well aware of the number of residents living at or below the poverty level, Masterson long has championed a “promise-to-pay” utility bill provision in which a customer in arrears can stave off having their utilities disconnected by promising to pay the bill in full by an agreed-upon date.
“The most heartbreaking example that I dealt with last winter was an elderly couple whose Social Security checks would be directly deposited at 3 that afternoon,
and they told the city that, but the city shut them off at 9:30 that morning,” Masterson said. “The city wouldn’t give them 5 hours.”
Humanity House’s most recent request to the Council was for a two-week grace period, or longer in extreme cases, such as if a customer experiences a water leak.
When the request was denied, “it convinced me that the only way things were going to see a change would be to change the people on the Council,” Masterson said.
Masterson is facing incumbent Kim Peterson and former Councilman Gene Myrick in the Nov. 7 general election to represent Iola’s Third Ward, which covers the southwest quadrant of the city. Advance voting begins Wednesday.
COMMUNITY service has been a way of life for Masterson, and has included work as a middle school teacher, 25 years with the Department of Social and Rehabilitation Services, the Circles out of Poverty program, and most recently as co-founder of Humanity House.
On top of that, she served on the Iola-USD 257 Board of Education for 20 years.
She considers her work a way of giving back to the community that stood in her family’s corner when they settled in Iola in the 1970s.
Masterson grew up in Little Rock, Ark., and moved to Kansas City in middle school when her father was transferred there through his job at AT&T.
Masterson was attending classes at Emporia State University when she met John, her future husband and Iola native.
“I thought he had moved me off the end of the earth when he moved me to Iola,” she laughed.
But any trepidation about Iola’s rural lifestyle quickly evaporated when the Masterson’s daughter, Jenny, was born.
