Saturday, February 16, 2008

What's in a street name? Plenty, Peralta Council told

Julia M. Dendinger News-Bulletin Staff Writer; jdendinger@news-bulletin.com

Having a street address bring lots of benefits - everything from pizza delivery to receiving birthday cards. A proper address also allows essential services such as fire and law enforcement to find a location in times of need.

County Code Enforcement Director Ruben Chavez spoke to the Peralta Town Council Tuesday evening about good procedures in naming roads and streets and the importance of having accurate addresses.

Chavez said addressing usually occurs when lot splits require the naming of a road or when a new subdivision goes in with new streets. "Addressing is not real exciting until you name it wrong and then the room fills up," Chavez said with a laugh.

Over the years, the county has experimented with three different ways of addressing, Chavez said. "Each commission has a slightly different philosophy about the naming of roads," he said.

For some time there was no policy, but that became a problem for emergency responses, Chavez said. "If you say Baca Road, which one do you mean?" he asked. Looking at a street index for the county, there are four Baca roadways - an avenue, a court, a lane and a road.

In the late '80s, Chavez said there was an interest in keeping the area culturally correct, and the county decided that all street names in unincorporated areas would be in Spanish. "Since we speak more Spanglish around here than Spanish, we eventually ran out of vocabulary," he said. Another issue with the all-Spanish name system was that some emergency dispatchers had a hard time pronouncing the names.

And then there was always the problem of the name fitting on the street sign — some of them got pretty long, Chavez said.

The county will accept family names for streets and roads, provided they haven't already been used, but Chavez said sometimes that can get a bit personal. "You might like living on a road named after your grandfather, but the next person might not," he said.

While the county has established a street naming policy and has moved away from the Spanish-only names and is accepting others, the issue of duplicate names can still be a problem, Chavez said. To remedy that, the county and the municipalities have a "gentleman's agreement."

"When I was working for Los Lunas to try and avoid duplicate name,s and since the county had the largest volume of street names, we made an agreement that when the municipalities named a street they would check with the county to make sure it wasn't going to be duplicated," he said. "Basically they just call Richard (Chavez) and ask him." Richard Chavez is the county's rural addresser.

Peralta Mayor Edward Archuleta said he asked Ruben Chavez to address the council because he had gotten a call from the county's rural addresser. "There was a lot split done before we incorporated, and there was a bit of a time crunch to get the road named," he said. "Richard followed the county's policy in naming that road."

Archuleta went on to say that given the lack of undeveloped land in Peralta, he didn't anticipate new roads needing names being a big problem for the town. "Could you tell me more about the agreement between the county and the municipalities on duplicate names?" he asked Chavez.

Chavez said that the agreement was an informal one that was entered into by all the parties due to the problems duplicate road names can cause.

Archuleta asked what kinds of problems could occur.

"In a perfect world, when someone calls 911, the system should zoom right in on their location," Chavez said. "The system we use is supposed to be 98 percent correct. However, in November, we had 300 to 400 corrections to make to the system. We are talking about something that is manmade, so it is best not to muddy the waters any more (with duplicate street names)."

With duplicate street names, law enforcement officers, firefighters and emergency medical personnel often find themselves relying on verbal directions from callers that get relayed to them through the dispatchers.

Councilor Nancy "Pug" Burge asked if the county had a process to change the name of a road. Chavez said it did; it's done by a petition to the county commission.

"We require a petition be signed by those living on the street that support the name change," he said. "As you can imagine, it's a huge hassle to change your address for every bill and statement you get."

On the subject of emergency calls, Burge asked how finding locations differed between a call from a land line versus an emergency call made from a cell phone.

Chavez said that with the county's E911 system, the cell towers have addresses so they can triangulate the signal and give a latitude and longitude to locate the call source.

Archuleta suggested that until the town adopts its own policy on naming roads and streets, it should follow the county's current policy. The councilors agreed.

E-mail this story Printer-friendly version