Over the past 5½ years, the football stadium at Iola’s Riverside Park has undergone a full-scale facelift.
With new seating, improved water drainage outside the facility, handicap-accessible restrooms and newly remodeled locker rooms, private donations have funded nearly all of the $300,000 worth of upgrades.
Donna Houser, wife of the late Iola High School football coach Ray Houser, has overseen the improvements every step of the way.
“We just kept seeing things that needed done, so we just kept doing them,” Houser said Thursday.
Within the last two months, Houser has collected funds for the last part of the stadium project, badly needed upgrades to the pressbox, with electric upgrades the centerpiece.
With the funds in hand, work will begin soon, she said.
And then she can rest — or so she thought.
AS PART of the Environmental Protection Agency’s citywide soil remediation project, inspectors found traces of lead-contaminated dirt surrounding both of the football field’s goal posts.
Houser estimates the soil to be removed covers roughly one-seventh of the entire football field. Yet, the entire field should be replaced, all agreed.
But because regulations restrict the EPA from paying to replace the entire field — feds can fund replacing only the contaminated parts — it put USD 257 officials in a quandary.
School administrators quickly realized the district could not afford such an expense this year.
Nevertheless, if local sources could come up with about $35,000, Veterans Worldwide — the firm overseeing the remediation — could replace the entire field.
So they tugged at the heart strings of a familiar face.
“I thought, ‘I just got this done,’” Houser laughed. “People are getting tired of seeing me asking for money, then asking for more money.”
Perhaps most stressful, she acknowledged, is asking others to help amid a pandemic when many are still out of work or otherwise suffering financially.
