When Oak Harbor School District Superintendent Rick Schulte closed the district’s aging Memorial Stadium last week, just days before the first home football game, some in the community saw it as payback for a failed bond levy.

That’s what Ray Raimundi told school board members Monday evening in an impassioned speech at the podium.

“It’s like rubbing our noses in it because the levy didn’t pass,” said Raimundi, whose son is on the football team.

Raimundi said he and other community members questioned why structural engineers scrutinized the 50-year-old stadium just weeks before the football season began. Such work could have been done at the end of the school year, giving the community time to come up with a repair plan.

“I’m not here to point fingers, but I feel betrayed,” Raimundi said.

But Schulte said he was taken by surprise by the severity of the stadium’s structural problems.

“None of the past inspections indicated to us there was any urgency,” he told parents and students who attended the meeting.

In discussing the upcoming inspection at the Aug. 25 school board meeting, Schulte told the board there were persistent rumors that the stadium was unsafe, but he was not overly concerned about the inspection.

“I don’t believe there is any danger of catastrophic failure (of the stadium),” he said at the meeting. His worst case scenario at the time was that the inspectors would recommend an occupancy limit.

Instead, engineers told Schulte there was “imminent hazard,” a warning that resulted in the immediate closure of the stadium.

Hunkered down at the corner of Whidbey Avenue and Midway Avenue, the aging stadium is considered not only a potential hazard but also an embarrassment by many members of the community. Its abrupt closure has brought those tensions to the surface yet again.

“I am disappointed in the community,”said Kathy Chalfant, a school board member and key organizer of recent bond levies, including this spring’s failed $7.9 million stadium levy. “We told everyone repeatedly and we tried three times, four times, five times. We cannot settle for mediocre.”

Since 1988, the school district has floated five bond levies in hopes of making major improvements to the open-air facility, with its exposed wooden bleachers and infield that quickly turns to mud. Memorial Stadium is widely considered the least desirable place to play in Oak Harbor’s 4A league.

Indeed, last winter the high school’s winning football team ceded home field advantage in a state playoff game because the stadium’s infield was considered to be too muddy and rough to play on.

The team was bussed instead to Mukilteo, with supporters making the long drive off Whidbey Island to watch their hometown team.

The question of how to repair the stadium highlights the ongoing friction in the community among those who feel voters who did not pass the bond levy should live with the consequences and others who insist an immediate — if temporary fix — is needed to help this year’s crop of high school students.

Schulte said he had received a barrage of phone calls from both camps. Many community members have offered their support, and lumber, to help brace the existing stands.

“We may have a barn-raising in the next week and a half,” Schulte said.

But others are just as adamantly opposed, Schulte said.

“They think it might give the inappropriate message that temporary is long-term,” he said.

School board member Chalfant appeared to agree with that line of reasoning.

“Mediocre,” she said, growing tearful at one point. “I don’t want to play that game.”

But others in the audience appeared pleased that the district is looking into faster ways to fix the stadium for this fall’s football season.

At the very least, they said, they would like home games to be scheduled for Coupeville. That’s where Oak Harbor ended up playing its opening football game last Friday night.

Football captain Ryan Payne, 17, an Oak Harbor High School senior who attended the school board meeting, said it was disappointing to not be able to play in his hometown.

“The Oak Harbor mentality seems to be ‘we’re second rate,’” Payne said.

Still, he was encouraged that so many Oak Harbor Wildcat fans drove to Coupeville.

“It was nice that so much of the community made the drive down, but it’s so much more fun to experience that in your home town.”