Northern county residents face address changes

By Linda Bell
Correspondent

Anyone who has moved knows how a new address complicates life. Larimer County, however, is giving some residents the opportunity to change addresses without the hassle of packing.

The Rural Site Addressing and Road Naming Improvement Project has come to northern Larimer County. The multi-year project is guaranteed to annoy some, while providing others with a much quicker response time from emergency services since their address is no longer confused with other roads bearing the same name.

One week in June in Red Feather Lakes was an excellent example of how the reality of change, as opposed to the possibility, affects county residents.

Susanne Durkin-Schindler, public involvement coordinator for the addressing project, met with 35 vocal residents who live primarily in the Creedmore Lakes Road corridor and within the Crystal Lakes subdivision in the 80545 zip code. They all received letters from the county informing them that their addresses will change this year.

In contrast, two nights later, Durkin-Schindler's team met with six of 323 residents who received letters explaining their properties are in a data collection area, which doesn't necessarily mean their address will change. The projected timeframe to complete that second section of Red Feather Lakes zip code is 2009.

Residents who live along a county road, for example Red Feather Lakes Road, can look forward to changing their address to the county's numerical and lettered designation, which is official county policy, Durkin-Schindler said.

She noted the meeting at Crystal Lakes was typical in that approximately 25 percent of the addresses in any one project area do change. Of the 2,097 letters sent to inform residents about address data collection last year, 438 received notice that their address is marked for change this year. This includes notification to owners of undeveloped or seasonal properties, as well as full-time residents.

"This half of the 80545 zip code has a higher than average percentage of absentee owners who would likely have a permanent address elsewhere," Durkin-Schindler said.

Residents at the Crystal Lakes meeting were upset that maps of the private roads in the subdivision would have to be altered at the community's expense.

Carlin Goggin, addressing coordinator for Larimer County, said that residences can be recommended for an address change for the following reasons: the current house number is out of sequence; the road is noncontiguous; the road is really a driveway that serves several residences; the property is not close to its known address; or the road name is a duplicate or near duplicate of other roads in the same zip code, in which case the first road to have that name usually gets to retain it.

Goggin said that a property's deed of trust goes by physical description and not address, so no deeds need to be changed.

Residents are given 45 days from notification to select a new road name if that applies, she said. Those new names are cleared with the U.S. Postal Service in Denver before they become official.

Goggin explained there is an appeal process within 60 days of the final county notification letter of the new address. If there is no resolution to the written appeal, the issue may go to the county commissioners for final arbitration, she said.

In some cases there can be no appeal, Goggin added. For example, if the address is on a numbered county road, if it doesn't conform to sequential numbering or parity (odds and evens), or if the road had no name in the first place, there's no appeal.

Durkin-Schindler said other areas of northern Larimer County, including the Livermore and Bellvue zip codes, are scheduled for address completion in 2008, with the exception of the Davis Ranch subdivision, which was used as a test area and is already finished.

The county has contracted with Spatial Data Research of Lawrence, Kan., for the data collection. SDR's representative, Dan Disharoon, drives area roads and driveways in a specially marked vehicle taking GPS readings for every address. At times it is necessary for him to visit homes to gather data or to leave a return-postage-paid data survey that residents can fill out and return.

In June, a few members of the Red Feather Lakes Plan Advisory Committee volunteered to come up with a list of new road names that fit the community's heritage. Residents who might be asked to select new road names can choose from the list, if they so desire.