County residents to get new addresses
Mineral County residents will be getting new addresses this summer to help emergency response vehicles reach their destinations faster.
Mineral County Planner Tim Read said that due to a federal mandate that all states become 911 compliant, Mineral County is working to re-address all homes and offices in the area and they plan to implement the new addressing system by June.
“We're way closer to having this project done than we've ever been before,” Read said.
He added that the county has contracted the job of mapping and re-addressing the buildings and property in Mineral County to Mapping and Planning Specialties, a company out of St. Paul, Minn. He said the county has spent nearly $100,000 on the project.
According to Read, over the last year and a half, he and MAPS have developed a digital database of every home in Mineral County with its old address and the address that they are going to assign it. The database also includes pictures of every home and business in the area, so 911 dispatch personnel can describe the buildings to drivers.
“The physical part of getting this data has taken a mind boggling amount of energy,” Read said.
Apart from mapping and taking pictures of the entire county, MAPS has also driven every road in the county with global positioning technology to create an accurate map of the entire area.
All of the emergency vehicles will also have printed atlases of Mineral County to help them find buildings. Read said this will be helpful because dispatchers and drivers will have identical documents to look at in emergency situations.
“The emergency people will finally have a reference document for these things,” Read said.
Read said the old addressing system used by the county was not based on any nationally or state recognized standards, so it was confusing and inaccurate.
He said the new system will be based on distances. Roads will either have 100 or 1,000 addresses per mile and the address will be a reference point for how far down a specific road that house is located. He added that the changes will also put all odd numbered houses on one side of the road and even numbered houses on the other.
In order to get this work done, Read said the county handed out address cards, talked with homeowners and acquired telephone records from Blackfoot Telephone Company. He said around 10 to 15 percent of the addresses in Mineral County will be changing. Read added that this percentage accounted for more than half of the residents in Mineral County.
He said that while many people have complained that their addresses are being changed, most of them realized they were being changed for the right reasons.
“I just asked them, ‘What does your address mean now?'” Read said.
Read said one of the most challenging parts of this will be getting the information changed for the post office since so many people are having their addresses changed.
Read said the implementation of the software will be paid for by a 911 tax that is included in residents' phone bills.