Disagreements continue over street readdressing

Nearly everyone attending the informal open house last week agreed that there are some problems with the current addressing system. But few could agree on the best solution, although many of those who gave up their time to attend offered suggestions.

Mountain Home's mayor and city council members were accepting citizen input on the readdressing for the Enhanced 911 emergency dispatch system. The majority of Elmore County has already readdressed. Now only the greater Mountain Home area remains.

The intent of the readdressing effort is to create a consistent scheme that will accomplish several objectives: to improve response time to emergency locations; promote quadrant consistency; provide sequentially numbered houses/buildings along streets; reduce address, street and intersection duplications; and to standardize designators (way, lane place, street, circle, center).

Mayor Dave Jett, explained that Mountain Home presents some unique challenges. The core of the city originally developed along the railroad tracks. But somewhere along the way, its development switched to a north/south, east/west grid system. Streets that had once been named by the community's early settlers, were changed to a numerical system. But because of the town's unusual layout, the numbering system was often thrown out of sequence.

Many of those speaking in opposition to changing street names and addresses felt that if the existing street signs were changed to reflect the full name of a street (5th West for example changed to S. 5th West), many of the problems would be eliminated.

"If this is being done for emergency responders, maybe it is time that those in the emergency services learned their way around town," claimed some of those participating in the discussion.

Mayor Jett quickly pointed out that the problem was not with the emergency people, but more with the citizens placing a 911 call. In the heat of the urgency, they often would provide only a partial address. 'I need an ambulance at XXX Third Street,' for example. So do they mean, N. Third East Street? Or maybe they mean W. Third North, or S. Third West? The large number of possibilities can cause delays.

The mayor also pointed out that Mountain Home is unique in the fact that approximately one third of its population changes every three to four years.

Few new residents, and even some of those who have lived here for some time understand the current system. They do not seem to know that Jackson Street is used to mark the north/south or that Main and N. Haskett were used as the east/west designators.

There were suggestions of color coding street signs to reflect the city quadrants. Councilman Mark Russell explained that throughout the county, colors have already been used to code the street signs. Green denotes a public road or highway; blue indicates a private road and brown is used for roads owned by the Forest Service. More colors could add to the already confusing situation.

House numbers also have caused confusion. One citizen pointed out he knew of an address listed as 1060 while directly across the street, the house number was 11 something.

Under the proposed system, numbers would be consistent within each block, with even numbers on one side of the street and odd numbers on the other. But making those changes would have a rippling effect, explained Councilman Tom Rist. If one number is changed, it can affect the numbers of houses on both sides of it.

While no decision has yet been made on the readdressing issue, the council members and mayor have been given more food for thought. "We know some changes have to be made," said Jett. "But we want to make sure those changes are for the better" -- not just changing simply to be changing and certainly not to make things worse.