The Vision Iowa Board has approved two-and-a-half million dollars for a new soccer stadium in Urbandale. The stadium will be the home to the Des Moines Menace soccer team. Sharon Safris is the director of the foundation raising funds for the stadium. She says they’d asked for three million from Vision Iowa, but can make up the difference.Safris says the stadium will hold six-thousand people for soccer and other sporting events, and can hold up to 15-thousand for other entertainment events like concerts. She says it’s going to be a unique facility built first for soccer. Safris says there are three such facilities in the U-S, but this is the only one in the Midwest. Safris says the final designs are being worked up now and they should be able to begin construction in August, with the opening set for May of 2003. The City of Urbandale is donating six million dollars in land, cash and other improvements for the project. The city will own the stadium and lease it to the Menace.
