NORTHWEST ARKANSAS — Newton County is the last county in the state using postal routes instead of physical addresses for the purposes of mail delivery and emergency services, but the conversion is under way.
“It’s like a five-year process,” said Pattie Mills, the county’s emergency management and 911 coordinator.
The conversion to physical addresses will improve the ability of emergency, mail and commercial services to reach county residents, Mills said. At present, anyone trying to find a person in the county has to navigate based on landmarks, such as “John David’s old barn,” that are only meaningful to locals, she said.
Physical addresses will provide a definitive location for a building, as opposed to a route number that doesn’t correspond to the building’s exact location, Mills said. The conversion will mean emergency workers and delivery drivers will be able to find residences without directions or the custom made maps used now, she said.
The conversion also will enable the county to implement enhanced 911 service, Mills said. Though residents would first have to approve a tax to pay for the service, enhanced 911 would make it possible for dispatchers to pinpoint the call for help, she said.
Mills said enhanced 911 would give dispatchers coordinates that can be passed on to a ground or air ambulance, so emergency workers will be able to go to the house that made the call, regardless of whether someone can provide directions.
“This is for emergencies, is what I try to stress to people,” she said.
MOBILE 911
A similar service for people dialing 911 on mobile phones was launched in August, Mills said, but that system is financed through a fee collected by mobile phone service providers and locates callers differently.
The mobile phone service is known as Phase II technology, said Paul Stricklin, administrator of the Arkansas Emergency Telephone Services Board, which distributes the 911 fee paid by wireless services.
Stricklin said Phase IItechnology uses transmission towers to locate the caller and send that information to the dispatchers. The system’s precision is determined by the coverage of a given area, he said.
Mills recently took over the $277,000 project of converting the county’s rural routes to physical addresses. It began in August 2009 with a deputy assessor overlaying U.S. Forest Service maps with aerial photos provided by the state. County staff members worked with the Arkansas Geographic Information Office to map every street and structure, first on a computer screen and then on the ground, she said.
“Every little thing they could tell was something they marked,” Mills said. “Then we sent people out to check out what it was.”
Mills said she is getting street numbers ready to put on road signs. All county roads were given a number to identify them, she said, which upset some people who prefer keeping existing road names.
Shelby Johnson, state geographic information officer, said the process of converting to physical addresses starts by determining which roads are public and which are private.
In some cases what looked like a road on an aerial photowas really just a path through a hay field made by a farmer on a tractor, Johnson said. He said the same applies to structures, which won’t all need addresses.
Once the roads were labeled, Johnson said, county workers were able to start assigning address ranges, based on the length of the roads. After the ranges are set, structures are given addresses based on their location on a given road.
For example, if a house is 3,205 feet down Newton County Road 40, its new address will be 3205 Newton County Road 40, Johnson explained.
Once all the new addresses are assigned, the data is sent to the U.S. Postal Service so it can match the new addresses to the routes it has been using, Johnson said. A typical house might have an address of Route 2, Box 48, but that will change to a specific address on a Newton County road, he said.
CHANGING POSTAL ADDRESS
Typically, the postal service changes its system to reflect the new addresses before residents are notified of the changes, said Leisa Tolliver-Gay, customer relations coordinator for the agency.
Tolliver-Gay said that once new addresses are linked to the old ones, the information is shared with customers. The addresses remain linked in the postal service system for threeyears so that any mail with the old address continues to be delivered, she said.
Residents don’t need to do anything to make sure their mail reaches them when their address changes because of 911, Tolliver-Gay said. In fact, submitting a change of address because of a 911 address change would cause mail to get “caught in a loop.”
Tolliver-Gay said a change of address form would make the postal automation system see the old and new addresses as the same and try to forward it.
Mills said the address data should be sent to postal service as soon as the state reviews it once more, but she didn’t have a time frame for when that would happen. She said that once the address conversion is complete, county officials can ask residents to approve a tax on land lines so that enhanced 911 service canbe implemented.
Johnson said that once the project is complete, he will ask the county for a copy so that it can be added to the statewide GIS database. He said he also would like to make it available to companies that provide commercial GPS products such as in-car navigation.
Without the updated maps, people traveling through Newton County can try to use incar navigation, Johnson said, but “it’ll lie to you.” To contact this reporter:
Northwest Arkansas, Pages 7 on 10/17/2011