Fairfield area’s top stories of 2024

Twenty twenty-four was an unforgettable year for residents of Jefferson County and the surrounding area.

The year saw a native Fairfield man win a gold medal at the Paralympics, a historic grain elevator close to make way for a new housing development, and thousands of cyclists stop for lunch during RAGBRAI.

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MATT STUTZMAN WINS GOLD

The town of Fairfield showed its appreciation for Paralympic Gold Medalist Matt Stutzman by welcoming him back to town with a parade on Saturday, Sept. 7.

Residents lined Burlington Avenue with American flags and signs congratulating Stutzman on the gold medal he won in archery at the Paralympic Games in Paris on Sept. 1. Not only did Stutzman take home the top prize but he also set a record, scoring 149 out of a possible 150 points.

In Central Park, Stutzman was mobbed by fans asking for his autograph. Stutzman, known as the “Armless Archer,” was happy to fulfill their request, putting a marker in between his toes to neatly sign his name. Friends and family members of Stutzman spoke during the ceremony, sharing both funny and touching stories from Stutzman’s life.

Those who know Stutzman have learned that he’s got a great sense of humor. While Stutzman was recounting his trip to Paris, he said that he made it until Atlanta “before my arms got tired” and he had to stop and get on another plane. Even before the event, he was referring to the 2024 Paralympic Games as the “Memories Game” because he planned to retire from the Paralympics after the competition.

Stutzman said that he’s 99 percent sure that Paris will be his final Paralympic Games, though there’s still a tiny chance he’ll come back to compete in the 2028 Paralympic Games in Los Angeles. Stutzman said he couldn’t think of a better way of ending his career than to go out as a gold medal-winner.

Stutzman added that he wasn’t the only “Armless Archer” at the Paralympics. In fact, Stutzman said that he and four other archers without arms competed in this Paralympics.

The Union asked Stutzman if he had ever met those other armless archers before.

“I taught them all how to shoot,” he said. “They’re from all over the world, Mexico, India, Belgium and Russia. I told them at these games, ‘It’s your job now to carry on the armless archer tradition.’”

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REIFF GRAIN BUILDINGS RECYCLED

The buildings at Reiff Grain on the north side of Fairfield were taken down in 2024, but they did not go to a landfill.

The buildings, such as its silos, elevator, and storage facilities, are being recycled. Melvin Bontrager, a concrete contractor and farmer from Kalona, is recycling the steel from the buildings as they are torn down. Martin Brett of Vastu Partners LLC purchased Reiff Grain and is turning the land into a housing development called North Campus Ridge, adjacent to his other housing development North Campus Village.

“Dave called around and found an Amish contractor [Melvin Bontrager], and he wanted those buildings for the farm community, to take them down and reconstruct them up there,” Brett said. “They take the steel skin to the scrap yard and get about $150 per ton. It’s a lot of work to take that stuff down, and they’re unbelievable workers. They took every bolt, and there were thousands of bolts, to get the steel skin off.”

As of Wednesday morning, Aug. 21, four of the Reiff Grain steel buildings had come down, including one shop and three grain storage facilities. Brett said the concrete in the buildings will be ground up, and then a magnet will remove the rebar from it. The resulting ground up concrete pieces will be used for the base of the gravel roads in North Campus Ridge.

CONSTRUCTION BEGINS ON NORTH CAMPUS RIDGE

Doug Bachar stood on the roof of a new triplex in North Campus Ridge, able to admire the quick progress he and his workers are making on Fairfield’s newest housing development.

North Campus Ridge is a joint venture between Bachar and Martin Brett of Vastu Partners LLC that is going up on the north edge of town, just west of their other housing development called North Campus Village. North Campus Ridge will accommodate 37 units when finished, including nine triplexes and two five-plexes.

Construction began in early 2024 after Brett learned that a $900,000-plus grant he had sought from the Environmental Protection Agency had come through, allowing him to purchase Reiff Grain on North Highway 1 and demolish its buildings to make room for the new development.

The foundation of the first triplex in North Campus Ridge was poured in February, and in early March Bachar and his crew began construction. He said progress was ahead of schedule, and that he’s able to start on a new building about every six to eight weeks.

Vastu Partners LLC purchased 16.8 acres from Reiff Grain, and that is being split into two halves. North Campus Ridge is being built on the eastern half of the property, while the western half is set aside for potential development at Maharishi International University. Brett said that representatives of MIU, which borders the property, have expressed a desire to expand north, possibly by building a dormitory at the former site of Reiff Grain. Tom Brooks, MIU’s vice president of administration, told The Union in 2023 that the university had no immediate plans for the land.

FAIRFIELD HOSTS RAGBRAI

The event was less than a day, but it took months of preparation for RAGBRAI’s visit to Fairfield to go off without a hitch.

Terry Baker, one of the three co-chairs of the Fairfield RAGBRAI Executive Committee along with Mendy McAdams and Monserrat Iniguez, said she was impressed with the hard work of the committee members and the large number of volunteers who helped ensure the 20,000 riders had a good time during their stop on Friday, July 26.

“We got quite a bit of feedback from riders and vendors that we were the best meeting town,” Baker said. “We were very organized and had lots of things for people to do, so people were really happy.”

The Fairfield RAGBRAI Hospitality Committee was in charge of creating artwork that fit the town’s theme of “Woodstalk,” which included putting a cornstalk outside the Fairfield Iowa Convention & Visitor’s Bureau’s office, and a giant peace sign in Central Park. That peace sign was made by Jeremy Cranston, who used a trampoline frame.

The riders began their morning in Ottumwa, and stopped briefly in Eldon before coming to Fairfield to grab lunch, dance to live music, and rest their legs before hitting the road again and traveling to Brighton, Wayland, Trenton and eventually to their next overnight stop in Mt. Pleasant.

A lot of the RAGBRAI riders wear funny shirts and costumes. Darrell Baetsle of Walford, Iowa, wore a T-shirt with the words “Please Don’t Run Me Over” printed on the back, and on the front the message was printed in reverse so it could be read in a vehicle’s rear-view mirror. Baetsle said the shirt was a gift from his daughter who found it on Raygun, and he felt there was no better occasion to wear it than on RAGBRAI.

FMS BOND VOTE FAILS

The Fairfield Community School District’s quest to pass a $38.5 million bond for a new middle school came up just short in 2024.

According to the unofficial results released by the Jefferson County Auditor’s Office on Tuesday, Nov. 5, voters in the school district cast 4,102 votes in favor (57.95 percent) of the bond and 2,976 votes against it (42.05 percent). Though the “yes” side won a majority of the votes, it needed to cross the 60 percent threshold required for bonds, so the measure failed.

Results from the auditor’s office show that of the 7,078 people who cast a ballot within the Fairfield School District on Tuesday, 637 did not vote on the bond measure.

It marks the second time in the last four years that the district has tried and failed to pass a bond for a new middle school. In September 2021, the district asked voters to approve a $34 million bond for a new middle school, plus adding air conditioning to the high school. Since that vote occurred during a special election, it drew far fewer voters, with 692 votes in favor (49 percent) and 721 votes against (51 percent)

The Fairfield school board asked the public to borrow money for a new middle school because of its ongoing maintenance costs. According to a fact sheet the district released in the summer, the middle school is costing the district about $1 million per year in maintenance costs, and estimated it would cost $40.4 million to renovate the existing building. School board members said the problems stemmed from the building, which opened in 1966, being built too low, causing constant water infiltration.

A fact sheet from the district indicated that, had the bond passed, it would have meant that a family with a $150,000 house would have paid an extra $175 per year in property taxes.

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HUFFMANS REVIVE FORMER LINCOLN SCHOOL

The former Lincoln Elementary School has life again.

After sitting mostly empty for the past decade, the former school, now called the Lincoln Center, was a den of activity this past November and December as it hosted JC Huffman’s “Ho Ho Ho Holiday Event.”

Jim and Teresa Huffman bought the building from the school district in the summer of 2024, and spent five months renovating it to be ready in time for its annual Christmas celebration, which begins the Friday after Thanksgiving and is held every Friday and Saturday until Christmas. The event featured a photo op with Santa and Mrs. Claus. Kids receive a printed photo, which they can put into a custom JC Huffman ornament. One room in the school was set aside for Whoville, including the Grinch himself. New this year was a Harry Potty-themed room with “butterbeer” and magic potion.

Teresa said she was pleased with the turnout for the first weekend, and received a lot of compliments on the building and how wonderful it looked.

“People felt more spread out instead of standing shoulder to shoulder,” she said. “People were congregating in the gym area, sitting and talking. It felt more like we were bringing people together versus let’s move you through a loop and out the door.”

Teresa said she and her family have poured hours upon hours of work into the building since taking possession of it on June 30. They spent a month cleaning out the building, throwing away old desks, chairs, cafeteria items, wrestling mats and high jump mats, and everything else the school district left behind. Once that was done, they replaced the HVAC and water systems. Teresa said the old boiler system was not drained properly and this caused all the pipes to freeze and break throughout the building, so those had to be replaced.

Another big project was removing the radiators from the classrooms, which left a big hole behind that a mason had to seal. There are now eight large furnaces and central air units, with zoned heating and cooling.

The Union asked Teresa how long it would take the Huffmans to recoup the investment they’ve made in the building, and Teresa estimated five to seven years.

SUPERVISORS PASS WIND ORDINANCE

The Jefferson County Board of Supervisors passed an ordinance this past September regulating wind turbines, after gathering information from residents in a pair of public hearings.

The first public hearing was held Aug. 5 and the second was Aug. 26, both of which drew supporters and opponents of wind farms in Jefferson County. The supervisors were gathering public feedback on a proposed ordinance that would require wind mills to be set back about half a mile from an occupied structure, which supporters of wind farms said was so restrictive that it would mean wind farms could not be built in the county.

For the Aug. 5 meeting, public comments were mostly critical of wind farms and their effect on the landscape, roads and farmland, with the only exceptions being representatives of wind energy companies who had come to speak. But the Aug. 26 meeting included both supporters and detractors, with supporters arguing that wind farms are an important alternative to coal-fired power plants, while opponents argued they were not a good fit for Jefferson County.

FHS RENAMES AUDITORIUM AFTER THREE TEACHERS

The Fairfield High School Auditorium was officially renamed the Mitcheltree, Slechta, Edgeton Performing Arts Auditorium during a dedication ceremony Tuesday night, May 7.

The ceremony was sandwiched between the performances of the FHS band and choir for their spring concert, and included the three honorees taking the stage to accept the recognition. A plaque was unveiled in the auditorium’s lobby depicting Linda Mitcheltree, Scott Slechta and Jim Edgeton, their years of teaching at the high school, and their accolades.

The plaque includes the line, “These teachers used their passion for the performing arts to instill a love of music and theatre in their students.”

The three teachers said they liked that this was a shared honor, especially since the three of them had collaborated on musicals performed on that very auditorium stage.

“I said in my speech and I’ve said all along, I’m glad I’m with those two,” Edgeton said about Slechta and Mitcheltree. “That’s the best part for me.”

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RICHLAND OPENS CHILD CARE CENTER

The town of Richland put another notch in its belt of accomplishments in early December with the opening of a new child care center, built exactly where the Richland High School once stood about a block west of the square.

The building is named after Jerry B. Robinson, a former Richland resident who donated $1 million to build the child care center. A ceremony on Monday, Dec. 9 was held to dedicate a flagpole donated by the Richland Community Club, as well as a cornerstone saved from the former school when it was torn down in 2021. Within the cornerstone is a time capsule of memorabilia from Richland High School courtesy of Richland Community Club member and former Richland Mayor Tom Hoekstra.

“I’m the only one who knows what’s in it,” Hoekstra said of the time capsule, which will be opened in 100 years. “I’ve accumulated a lot of stuff from Richland High School over the years, even though I graduated from Pekin.”

Hoekstra attended Monday morning’s dedication, and said he felt a sigh of relief upon seeing the child care center open its doors.

“Rome wasn’t built in a day,” Hoekstra said. “Everything goes back to Jerry Robinson. He always wanted to do something here in town, to invest in a project here.”

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