New county street addresses not needed
No county road or address had to be changed in anyway to comply with the new 911 emergency location requirements.
Let me state the location numbers corresponding with residents' household phones is an excellent way to locate someone in need of assistance at residences anywhere (for lack of better wording, let's call it Enhanced Caller ID), but there are many residents in the county who do not have telephone lines to their homes, and in some cases even power lines due to the dollar expense of having them run to their homes.
Some of those residents use cell phones, and where this is so, the new location numbers are ineffective because of no signal and the portability of the cell phones.
The older addressing system designations, star routes, rural routes and home contract routes (HCR) as a prefix to route box numbers meant the address was outside of the local mail delivery area (city limits etc…)
The new county resident addressing system is very misleading in this regard by dropping the route designation. It now looks like almost every county resident now lives in the town of Bonners Ferry proper, and hardly anyone lives in the county proper, and we all know this is not true.
Common sense and property location records etc…, tell us the majority of residents live some other place in the county of Boundary proper, and not the small town of Bonners Ferry. Two examples: Eastport and Porthill each are located in northern Boundary County and have their own U.S. Post Offices and zip codes to cover their respective areas.
According to the new addresses being forced onto residents of Boundary County living in these areas (and I'm sure other locations in the county), they now all live in Bonners Ferry proper. There is no way, by looking at the new addresses, to feel that they really live in outlying areas of the county.
The only way the new addressing system would work is if we had physical (addresses) to the residents' home mail delivery, which we never will.
Most residents of the outlying areas have a mailbox placed along the main highways for mail delivery, and many have to travel 1/4 mile or more to pick up their mail from the boxes along the main route.
The old logically consistent numerical mailing address system has worked quite well for decades, but has now been made an illogical mess by a private contractor. The following example is for “demonstration only.” New addresses, Box 105 Leaf Road, and right next to it Box 50, Mount Road, Box 801 Bridge Road, etc…as you can see, the contractor threw logic to the way side.
The old mail routes covered areas 3 or more miles on each side of the routes, with the mailboxes being placed along the main road and not on any of the numerous side roads.
This new but not improved mess for new addresses is costing all of us time and money and did not need to happen.
Mark Shreve Sr.
Porthill