This is a letter I wrote to two residents in Area C in regards to the Street and Postal address changes:
I know you are not happy with the change, as are many others, but I want you both to understand the situation in its entirety.
The Post Office came to me and said they were eliminating the Rural Route postal addresses. That meant that virtually everybody living in Area C would have to change their mailing address. This would have happened even without any street naming change. I can’t say I was thrilled with that news. However, it did provide an opportunity to fix what I and many others felt was a broken addressing system.
OK what next: I had several options, this is what I chose to do. Realizing that the change of postal addresses was the most onerous part of any change of address and realizing that presently we had three addresses for every location: postal, 911 numbering, and highways (the original street names), I decided to garner public opinion. I had 2 public meetings at the beginning – 5 in total, where I said that I was only going to assist in the change if we adopt a one address system. The public agreed with that direction. I wanted to have the public decide on which system they preferred to adopt: the original street names or the 911 numbering system. At both meetings, those in attendance, in an exit poll, unanimously stated their preference to revert back to the original street names. I let them know that regardless of which system was adopted there would be lots of modifications. It worked out that just over 50 streets would need to be renamed or newly named for purposes of clarity, brevity and common sense according to both Highways and Regional District staff. The exit poll unanimously agreed to any new names being native plant, shrub and tree species – continually relevant and unique and distinct from the Town’s naming system. Aside for a few exceptions like Willowbrook Rd and Park Rill Road, for the most part that is how it worked out.
In hindsight, maybe I could have done a better job in involving the public in naming the streets. At first I resisted, but persistent residents convinced me to do it for one street (Golden Mile); I saw it was possible, I then actually encouraged others to do the same. It worked out great since it ended up that approximately 15 streets were named by the residents living on those streets. Unfortunately, it only really works for those short streets; the longer streets we tried to put short, easy, common plant names, or familiar geographical names on them like Willowbrook Road and Park Rill Road. I thought it went quite well overall.
We did experience real problems, for instance, we had several mailouts to all the residents but hundreds didn’t get them for whatever reason. We also saw that some residents were notified a couple of times with more than one address, this was especially prevalent with the mobile home blocks. I apologize to all the residents who were not properly notified.
Now that Canada Post has just recently done the change to the new postal addresses, the problem that requires immediate attention is the actual house numbers must be changed to the new numbers. This is especially important for emergency services to obtain quick and easy access to all residents in Area C. We will be doing a door to door campaign to tackle that issue.
I did not run for office with the intention of changing our street names and mailing addresses but if two years from now when everybody is used to the change, we have one address instead of three, and when all agencies including GPS navigation and emergency services are on the same page then I feel it will all be worth it and that we will have a much better system then when we started. However, if anybody attempts another change while I’m still alive, I will go ballistic – a mushroom cloud that will be seen and heard throughout the entire district.
Thank you Area C residents for your patience and understanding on this extremely difficult and onerous project.
Allan Patton
Electoral Area C RDOS Director