(Radio Iowa) – There are over 70 public skate-parks in Iowa — and the newest is in northwest Iowa. Sheree Hausmann served on the committee that raised nearly 390-thousand dollars for construction of a skate-park in Cherokee. “We started raising our money in the fall of 2021 and we’ve received quite a few local donations and quite a few grants and so we came up with the money,” she says, “and the skate-park was supposed to have been done earlier this year, but when the floods came in June, everything came to a standstill, so we had to wait for everything to dry out.”

A California company that started building skateboard ramps in 1997 was the contractor for the Cherokee skate-park. Hausmann says unfortunately, the company had all its forms set up and was ready to start pouring concrete when the flooding hit Cherokee in June. “The forms are actually real heavy-duty Styrofoam and they all washed away in the flood,” Hausmann says. “We had to put our feelers out and start looking for them and, if you know Cherokee at all, you know there’s a lot of green space and a lot of trees, but as luck would have it we found all those forms and they were all able to be used.”

Cherokee’s skate-park covers about 10-thousand square feet and has typical features like ledges and a big bowl for skateboarders. Construction started in April and a grand opening was held at the end of September.