Martin Luther King Jr. Drive will get new address numbers, as requested by the Bulloch County 911 address coordinator with support from the post office and approved by Statesboro City Council.
The city created MLK Drive from Blitch Street and a portion of Institute Street in 2002. By then, the numbers were apparently already a mess, Shannon Mixon, the 911 addressing coordinator, said in an interview. She described the current situation Tuesday morning to City Council.
“It was readdressed for the name only, previously, and the numbers were left in disarray, and it is causing confusion across the board,” Mixon said. “We really need to get this taken care of.”
Right now, a lot of disarray is packed into the numbering of just 38 structures. As shown on photographic map Mixon gave the council, Number 27 is at the Northside Drive intersection, while Number 61 is seven blocks to the south. Between them are numbers as low as 5 and as high as 223. Number 5 is next to one Number 210, but there are two buildings numbered 210, with an intersecting street between them.
Numbers 112 and 118 are also duplicated, but one of the 112s has been designated 112 B.
North of Northside Drive, which is part of U.S. Highway 80, Martin Luther King Jr. Drive is numbered in the low 600s, followed by 706, as included in a list of owners but not in the aerial photo.
The solution
Mixon’s plan assigns Martin Luther King Jr. Drive sequentially numbered blocks, starting with a 1-99 block on the south end, followed by a 100-199 block, 200-299 block and so on, up to a 1400-1499 block. Some gaps in the number series will be left in places to allow for future buildings, Mixon said.
She plans to send letters to residents and businesses about two weeks from now.
“They will have 30 days to post the new address and to contact the phone company, and they will have up to a year to change over all of their mailing, their bills, advertising, et cetera,” Mixon told the council.
The 30-day guideline is for residents to post the new addresses. Mixon said she likes to give businesses 60 days to post the physical number on their property and contacting the telephone company so that the new address is reflected in the 911 database.
Mail and 911 issues
Also speaking to the council about the effect of the confused addresses, Nancy Akins, the Bulloch County 911 center’s mapping manager and previously a dispatcher, gave the example of finding Number 9 in the middle of the 200 block.
“If I can’t find it in the daytime, looking at a map on the screen … I know that the responders can’t find it either, especially at night,” Akins said. “So it’s really important that these streets, especially this one, get readdressed.”
From what she has learned, residents with duplicate addresses are currently sharing a mailbox, Akins said.
Mike Thompson, Statesboro postmaster for the U.S. Postal Service, also spoke.
“We have been fighting this for a little while, and last month our database coordinator said we are going to quit with Martin Luther King, there’s just no way to number that,” Thompson said.
In other words, because the software will not accept the out-of-sequence numbers, the mail for MLK Drive cannot be scanned at a computerized sorting center, Thompson explained. The local post office would still deliver mail on MLK Drive, but would have to hand sort it, he said.
MLK is not the only street or road in Statesboro and Bulloch County that has problems of this kind, Mixon said in the interview Wednesday. Statesboro Fire Department Chief Tim Grams implied as much at the council meeting, where he confirmed that emergency responders have had difficulty finding addresses there on a couple of occasions.
“That is one of our interesting streets,” Grams said.
District 2 Councilman Sam Jones, who made the motion adopting the new street numbers, said he believes residents will accept them.
“They’ll want the EMS to get there at the right address in a timely manner, and make it quick,” Jones said.
The motion, seconded by District 1 Councilman Phil Boyum, passed unanimously.
Northside 2014
The last major renumbering effort, for Northside Drive, was completed in 2014. But the results have not been accepted by everyone, Mixon told the city officials.
“For the most part, it went smoothly,” she said. “There are still some businesses that refuse to change. There’s been businesses that have posted their old address when it wasn’t originally posted …, and so there’s a handful of them that are still kind of lingering, but unfortunately we have no way of forcing them to change.”
The only thing she can do is request that the post office cut off their mail after a year, she said.
Herald reporter Al Hackle may be reached at (912) 489-9458.