A handful of residents on Gouldie Street will be getting new addresses soon, whether they want them or not.
Currently, Gouldie Street has adjacent properties with street numbers 46 and 46A and Fire Chief Steve Hernen said that creates a problem for emergency responders.
If a 911 call came in from 46A Gouldie Street, “the crew would come to 46 and stop because they know unit numbers start inside the building, so we go in looking for unit A not realizing that 46A is next door,” he told Councillors at the March 30 General Committee meeting.
“(The lot) was subdivided 28 years ago and that’s when this problem was created. It should have been fixed then,” he added. And now that it has been brought to the attention of the Town thanks to a rezoning application for the property, the municipality has an obligation to correct it, he said.
The municipal standard for 911 addresses is for there to be a different 911 number – designated by the familiar blue-plate address signs – every 10 metres. “That’s why when you drive down a country road you’ll see number 100 and then the next sign you come to is 152,” explained Hernen. “It’s based on frontage to account for inflow.”
Most of the Huntsville area is numbered that way, but when that system was adopted 23 years ago, the downtown core was left with the numbering system it already had, said Hernen, and the system was built out from there.
Back then, situations similar to the one on Gouldie Street which required renumbering cropped up regularly but that has since slowed to one or two cases per year.
Councillors acknowledged the need for the change but there was lengthy discussion about how to best go about reassigning numbers to reduce the inconvenience and financial hardship on the affected property owners.
Town staff suggested larger leaps in the address changes, rather than increasing each by just one, to account for possible future development, and also avoiding reusing one of the current property numbers to avoid confusion for Canada Post. So 46A Gouldie Street will become 46, the current 46 will become 52, 48 will become 54, and 50 will become 58.
The proposed 911 civic addressing changes on Gouldie Street
Earlier in the meeting, Lynda West, who has lived at 48 Gouldie Street with her husband Marvin for 31 years, was before Committee asking them to consider the implications of an address change, particularly for homeowners who operate home businesses.
Our family is very upset about the possibility of having to change our address. We are not opposed to development. The owner of the duplex asked us if we had an issue (with the redevelopment of the property) and we said no, but had we known at the time that it was going to possibly create an address change for us we may have rethought that.
Gouldie Street homeowner Lynda West
She noted that five people use their address as a home mailing address, which would require submitting updates for things like drivers’ licenses, insurance policies, credit cards, utilities, investments, pensions, and doctor and dentist offices, and for some of which they would incur fees. West also runs two businesses out of her home and all of her marketing materials like business cards, rack cards and pamphlets will need to be updated, increasing her out-of-pocket expenses due to the address change.
Councillor Det Schumacher was particularly vocal in his opposition to the costs incurred by property owners.
Committee Chair, Councillor Brian Thompson, asked how Councillors would feel about amending the proposed resolution to allow for compensation to property owners. The compensation would not apply to those who were required to change their address in the past.
To that end, Town staff were directed to include a provision for financial compensation within the bylaw and determine what the criteria and limits on compensation might be before the bylaw is presented to Council at the end of April.
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