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Some rural residents could get new addresses

Some rural Huntington County residents may soon have new addresses if a proposal by the Huntington County Surveyor's Office is passed.

The Indianapolis-based Schneider Corporation has submitted a bid to review property addresses within the Huntington County Geographic Information System (GIS) and all other county departments.

The proposal is the final phase of work on updating and correcting the GIS that was begun earlier this year.

County Surveyor Jay Poe cites several businesses in the Warren area that are not even close to where the proper geographic address should be.

"We need this fixed now," Poe says.

A number of years ago, Huntington County, like many Indiana counties, renumbered its road system and the corresponding addresses to better help identify rural addresses for emergency personnel.

Each structure in those areas was given an address based on the distance from the county road crossroad nearest the center of the county.

For example, the address 4400W-900N is supposed to be four-tenths of a mile west of County Road 400 along County Road 900 on the north side of the roadway.
However, there has been no field verification of the exact addresses since the system was implemented, leaving an unknown number of irregularities in the system.

Furthermore, multiple county agencies have the authority to change addresses, and often, the changes are not passed on to all involved departments.

"There are too many hands in the cookie jar," Poe says. "We don't have any protocol to notify other offices if one office makes a change."

Richard Hinton, owner of Town and Country Homes in Huntington, pointed out one of the inconsistencies in the county road system.Hinton cited a property at 9091N-500W that was recently sold to an out-of-state company in a recent sheriff's sale. He says that the property has two different addresses within county records: 9091N-500W and 9092N-500W.

"Now, we have to tell them they need to re-do the paperwork because the address needs changed," Hinton says.

To fund the project, the commissioners may use leftover funds totaling $9,754 from earlier work done by Schneider Corp. as well as an estimated $3,000 to be taken from another fund.

"We hope that not many people will have physical address changes," says Nate Schacht, executive director for the Huntington Countywide Department of Community Development. "It's not a real happy thing for people, and rightfully so. But for the safety aspect (dispatching emergency personnel), they'll understand."

Schacht says that the county commissioners will be asked to approve the proposal at their meeting on Monday, Sept. 21. In the best-case scenario, he says the evaluation should be complete by the end of 2009, and residents needing address changes will be notified after the first of the year.