Will All Addresses In The County Will Soon Change?
UPDATE: This story is an update to a story we did back in April of 2012.
OK, we knew it was coming..
Back in April (2012) Smokey Barn News was contacted by a Robertson County resident who received a letter that stated that the E911 Dispatch Center was going to be changing his address, an address he has had for many years.
It turned out that all streets and roads in Robertson County were going be assigned a NEW address. Currently we have about 50 feet of separation from one address to another on our roads. The new system will provide an address every 5.28 feet, or roughly every 5 feet on every road in the county.
According to Cathy Lowe, the 911 business office coordinator, “In the past, if a new building went up or you changed your garage into an apartment, an address was just pulled out of the sky.”
This new system gives the County evenly spaced addresses to assign new or re-assigned structures. If your street happened to be 100 feet long it will now be divided up into 20 addresses. Each new address can be assigned to what ever structure is closest to it.
Over 50 Streets have already been re-addressed.
The entire state of Tennessee is committed to this new system. It’s all designed to help emergency responders find your home or business in an emergency.
UPDATE:
UPDATE: E911 Says Never Mind on address changes…. (Oct. 23, 2012)
The E911 addressing board was invited to make a presentation at the Robertson County Commission Meeting held October 15th on why the county-wide address changes were needed. ( Below is a VIDEO of the meeting.
If you watch the video you’ll see the presentation didn’t go all that well. The turning point in the presentation was when someone asked if the state mandate was actually requiring the re-addressing to be done county wide. The answer was surprisingly, no, only the anomalies were mandated.
Apparently the 911 Business Office decided on their own to align the entire county to the new E911 address standards instead of just updating the address anomalies that fell under the State standards for adjustment. The realization that there was no state mandate forcing the entire county to be re-addressed is when the frustrations in the room escalated.
Back in April when Smokey first broke this story, the 911 Business Office was changing just one street and as you can see in the video the residents were not too happy about it. In fact, Smokey was hard pressesd to find anyone that seemed very happy about the changes. In their presentation on Oct. 15th and back in April even 911 Business Office said they were not in love with the idea of changing their own addresses. After all, changing your address is a potentially time consuming and costly endeavor for residents and especially business owners. You can also see in the report that the 911 Business Office clearly eluded that more changes were coming and in fact since April they have already readdressed about 50 streets in the county.
The very next day after making the presentation at the Robertson County Commission Meeting the E911 board met and unanimously voted to stop the address changes on all but those that fell within the E911 address error mandate. So, if you have NOT already received notification that your address is being changed then it’s probably not going to change; at least for now..
“The 911 board has made the proper decision to not go forward with the re-addressing at this time, says Robertson County Mayor Howard Bradley.” “I think the actions that they contemplated did not take into account the complications that would arise in terms of receiving ones mail, drivers licence changes, mortgages… all those things had to be considered before any kind of complete readdressing could be considered, so they have made the right decision to put this on hold at the present time. ”
They may look at more changes in the future when the economy improves but for the moment we’re all off the hook..
All right if we’re gonna do this we need to do it right, and only do it once. It happened once already back in the 90’s or whenever it was. My address changed from 250? something road to 251? something road. Why we’re needing to do it again? Who cares. Fine, let’s make the change. But we need to give everybody 5-digit street numbers or something, because this is disrupting to businesses. Residences, who cares, they can deal with it easier but businesses have to reprint all their business cards, yellow page and Internet ads, all inside correspondence, etc. It’s interrupting and it costs a lot of money. So let’s do this crap and let’s do it the right way so we WON’T have to do it again in ten years.
Oh and just so it’s on the record, if the powers that be decide to change street names like I’ve seen it done, you will all have a fight on your hands.