New Address, Same Home Kootenai County’S 911 Upgrade Means Street Names, House Numbers To Change

A burly man walked into the Kootenai County Planning office to complain about the new name chosen for his employer’s road.

Sue Koppel, assistant planner, asked the polite man what road name had upset his boss.

“Pussy Toes Lane,” the man replied, adding that his employer would sue if the county didn’t change the name selected by four neighbors to honor the Western wildflower used by Native Americans to extract gum from its stalks.

The county renamed that road “Jacobs Ladder Trail,” but it represents only one of more than 17,000 addresses and street names the county is changing so it can upgrade its emergency response system.

Under the current method, 911 dispatchers must ask the caller where they live, find the address on a map, decide which agency to send and then make the call, said Bill Schwartz, the county’s director of emergency services.

“When people are hurting and really in trouble, they need help right away,” Schwartz said. “That’s simply not possible without an addressing system.”

Schwartz relayed a story from this year of a rural resident who called 911 but could not talk to dispatchers.

“She called in and was alone and she was having a heart attack,” Schwartz said. “All we got was a telephone number.”

Dispatchers had to call the local telephone provider to trace the emergency call, a process that can take 15 minutes.

“Only then can we dispatch the units because we have no idea where that person is calling from,” he said.

By the time paramedics arrived, the woman had died.

Schwartz hopes to start this October obtaining equipment necessary to develop the $1 million enhanced 911 system.

With that in place, a distress call is displayed on a computer screen. It shows dispatchers the telephone number and address where the call originated even if the caller can’t speak.

It will also show other pertinent information, such as which one of 14 county fire districts should respond.

“We can’t say the new system would have saved (the woman’s) life, but we wanted the chance to try,” Schwartz said. “These delays are not acceptable.”

Before the county spends money to upgrade the system, it first needs to fix a haphazard practice of numbering homes, senior planner Rand Wichman said.

“Our addressing system had become a nightmare over the years,” Wichman said.

After four years of work, the last of the address-change notices will be mailed out this fall. The county hopes the entire process of fixing mistakes and deciding appeals will be complete sometime next year.

The mammoth $250,000 project has dealt mostly with unincorporated areas of the county. Cities such as Coeur d’Alene and Hayden had proper addressing systems in place so they had few changes.

Post Falls, however, is changing the names of at least 39 roads, according to Collin Coles, senior planner. Thousands of Post Falls residents will have their address numbers changed, too.

In a county with more than 15 street names with the word “Pine” in them, something had to be done to create uniformity, Coles said.

“Is there a real confusion? That’s a judgment call,” Coles said. “If you can eliminate that, you’re helping.”

Coles said new names for the Post Falls roads will stay within the same theme of their original names - Forest Lane will be Bark Loop, Ponderosa Drive will be Birch Loop, Pines Road will be Cider Road.

Beyond the administrative nightmare, residents have flooded the county with requests, complaints, notifications of mistakes and appeals.

“Let’s face it, changing an address is a pain. I’ll be changing mine for the second time in a year,” Wichman said. “And it costs money, especially if you run a business out of your home.”

Addresses often become a part of a person’s identity.

“There is, for whatever reason, an emotional tie to your address,” Wichman said. “I’ve given up on trying to understand it.”

Wichman knows firsthand about folks’ frustrations. The county even messed up his address, giving him an odd instead of even number. The county also gave him a number that was out of sequence with his neighbor.

“Unfortunately, we’re all in the same boat,” he said.

The technical change in how the county now assigns addresses has gone from a guessing game to more of a science.

Before, planners would look at a map grid of the county and assign road names and numbers.

However, those numbers didn’t necessarily comply with addresses in area cities.

That left situations on some roads, such as Prairie Avenue, where a home in Hayden could have the same number as a home three miles away in the county.

Planners would sometimes assign east-west numbers on a road that then turned into a north-south road, giving it numbers 3000 to 1000 to 6000, all in a one-mile stretch.

Many road names were duplicated, such as Hauser View Road, and others such has Riffle and Ripple sound so similar that it’s difficult to decipher between them during a 911 call.

The county tried to fix the Riffle-Ripple problem, but misspelled Riffle. The notices changed the road name to “Rifle.”

“Historically, (addressing) has been done on maps. It’s not been done in a comprehensive way,” Wichman said.

The solution came by changing to a mileage-based system. Now all address numbers are based on how far they are located from a central point.

The county contracted with a private company that sent an army of college kids to take global-positioning satellite readings of every road in the county.

Instead of numbering the location of houses, the new addressing system now numbers the spot where driveways enter the road.

For instance, the new numbers on Hayden Lake Road start at one point and the addresses ascend numerically until the road ends.

But as the college kids invaded the county armed with the GPS units and worn-out county vehicles, more problems surfaced.

When a road name wasn’t apparent, the young workers would often make something up, leading to myriad headaches.

One worker tried to name a road after a type of tree, but misspelled it to read “Sycakmore Road.” Hellofahill Road got changed, but Whiskey Dick Road made the cut.

Residents have 12 months after receiving the address notification to correct mistakes or appeal road names to the Kootenai County Commission.

George Evjen, an assistant planner, handled 270 calls in two days after the county mailed out the last address changes.

“I’ve been involved with this for two months and I’ve yet to hear anyone say, `Thanks. We appreciate this.”’

And the angry responses have not all been from residents.

The U.S. Postal Service got involved in the process because its machines have problems reading addresses that don’t start with a number.

The East Side Highway District also sent a letter to the county on June 19 protesting the fact that it will have to pay for a bunch of new road signs.

“It has come to our attention that the county is renaming a number of roads within our jurisdiction,” the district commissioners wrote. “We strongly oppose that move, especially when we have not had the courtesy of being involved with the decision.”

While the process may be frustrating for everyone, it had to happen, Schwartz said.

“I truly do understand the inconvenience it is causing our citizenry,” Schwartz said. “But it could save their lives.”