It may take some getting used to, but an address system is in the works and the organizers hope you’ll cooperate, they said at the first of three meetings called by the Lieutenant Governor’s Office to get residents on board with the Street Addressing Initiative.
“Good addressing can make a lot of difference in the cost of government,” said Martha Wells, the director of consulting services at Spatial Focus.
The Maryland-based company was hired by the government to help orchestrate the change from helter-skelter addresses throughout the territory. Many streets have no names and many houses have no numbers, but Spatial Focus and the Street Addressing Initiative are attempting to change this to an organized address system, which will include streets with names as well as numbers for all houses and plots of land.
Wells said this means the houses will be numbered like those on the mainland with odd numbers on one side of the street and even on the other.
Seeming a bit amazed, she outlined one area on St. Thomas where the numbers marched up one side of the street and down the other, with a house with a completely different number randomly thrown into the mix.
Saving lives is one reason why the territory needs a comprehensive and easy-to-understand address system. Wells said that while the Police Department and Fire Service have good dispatching equipment, the lack of addresses means they can’t get to people.
“Every year people die because the emergency service arrives after 35 minutes instead of 12,” said Sen. Craig Barshinger, a St. John resident.
Three areas were chosen as pilot projects – the greater Cruz Bay area on St. John, downtown Charlotte Amalie on St. Thomas, and Mon Bijou on St. Croix. Wells and others said they hoped community groups and homeowners’ associations will come up with street names agreed to by all in the neighborhood. Wells said there will not be two streets on the same island with the same name.
The Street Addressing Initiative will assign numbers to houses, but Wells said it will be up to the homeowners to put that identification on their properties.
Residents should expect field workers to fan out around the pilot areas starting in March. In April and May, they’ll hang tags on doors so the homeowners can confirm that the information they gathered about plot numbers is correct. The tags will also inform residents of their new house number and street name.
“We’ll finalize the three pilot areas by the end of June,” said Michael Terner, a consultant with the Boston-based Applied Geographics, who is also working on the project.
About a dozen St. John residents showed up at the meeting held Wednesday at St. Ursula’s Multipurpose Center. Among those were members of the St. John Historical Society, who came armed with an old Danish map that indicates the names given to some of the downtown Cruz Bay streets.
While most Cruz Bay streets do have names, though not always the historical ones on the Danish maps, that isn’t the case in most residential areas. And in some cases those residential areas now have names that don’t reflect the area’s history. That doesn’t sit well with St. John resident Theodora Moorehead.
“Chicago Hill is really Freeman’s Ground,” she said, speaking about a location on the outskirts of Coral Bay that now has a name that reflects the origins of some of its residents.
Wells was quick to point out that the plot names recorded on the tax records will remain even after the new street and number system comes into play. She said they’ll be linked together.
A second meeting was held Wednesday on St. Thomas with the third planned for 7 p.m. Thursday at John H. Woodson Junior High School on St. Croix.
For more information, call Christopher George, Geographic Information Systems coordinator at the Lieutenant Governor’s Office, at 776-8505 ext. 4321.
