“If it bleeds it leads,” is a time-tested, and unfortunate, truism in the news industry.
Try as we might to cast the area in a positive light, the Register’s most-read stories for 2023 involved car wrecks, plane crashes and encounters with law enforcement, according to the number of views tabulated on iolaregister.com.
Even so, the good news far outweighed the bad.
Two long-developing stories over the year concerned a new Veterans Administration clinic coming to Iola in 2024 and the designation of Lehigh Portland State Park.
Reporter Vickie Moss first wrote about the VA clinic in February 2023, when officials cautiously announced that if they could find a location they would build the clinic sometime in the next few years. The Iola clinic will consolidate services currently provided in Garnett, Fort Scott and Chanute.
The idea was pitched as long ago as 2011, when we reported locals were working to bring a 68-bed Veterans Affairs longterm care home here. The facility was expected to create 70 jobs.
Former Iolan Carolyn McLean spearheaded the effort.
At the time, a VA clinic was viewed as a convenient addition. McLean envisioned it would operate out of a new medical arts building on the grounds of what would be our new hospital, completed in 2013.
McLean envisioned Iola “the mecca of VA health care.”
Though her efforts did not yield results, perhaps they planted the seeds for the clinic.
Eight months after Moss’s initial story, word came in October confirming a new facility able to serve the area’s 860 veterans would open in spring of 2024, though no site had been identified.
Then on Dec. 22, VA officials announced the clinic will be stationed at 1408 East St., along with The Family Physicians and Iola Pharmacy drive-through.
For 12 years, we’ve been tracking this story. Glad to see it has a happy ending.
THE IDEA to convert the lake and surrounding property that once belonged to the Lehigh Cement Company into a public park is a 50-year dream come true.
Lehigh Portland operated the cement plant from 1900 to 1970. In 1971, it sold its property to Iola Industries, a group of local investors.
