Sean C. Morgan
Of The New Era
Some Sweet Home residents may eventually have reason to order new checks, driver’s licenses and other personal correspondence and identification because they may be living on a street with a different name.
If the City Council approves a new ordinance next week, it will open up new options for street names in Sweet Home and eventually pave the way for correcting existing problems in both street names and addressing.
The council held its first and second readings of the proposed ordinance during its regular meeting on April 25. It will hold one more reading with a decision at its meeting on May 9.
Current city ordinance requires east-west streets to be named after trees and shrubs. North-south streets are numbered from 1 to 60 east of 1st Avenue. East of 1st, east-west streets are called lanes.
The problem, officials say, is the east-west streets.
“At this time, the fast growth of the city is exhausting reasonable names of trees and shrubs and has created a need for more flexibility in naming streets, both public and private,” Senior Engineering Technician Joe Graybill said. “All new streets receive unique names not repeated elsewhere within the city.
“In order for public safety (agencies) to be able to locate properties being newly created and to avoid confusion of location names, these proposed changes to designate alternative naming conventions are needed.”
The new ordinance will permit names of trees, shrubs, flowers or other common plants species.
Alternative naming conventions may be reviewed and acccepted for public subdivisions and planned developments. Alternative names must “conform to a cultural, geographical or historical context.”
The ordinance will require street names be the same for the street’s entire length inside the city limits. Streets that are not currently connected but will be may use the same name, but streets that will never be connected cannot share the same name. That means no more streets like Nandina or Osage, with multiple locations.
The new ordinance will be easier to adjust to correct errors, omissions or changes in the Linn County tax assessor maps, address procedures or changing street names, Graybill said. It also will provide additional street name types, including designations like circle, loop or drive, for example.
It will provide private street signage and standards, clarify visible address techniques on development sites and create a notification and appeals process.
Graybill has been working on dealing with incorrectly named streets and incorrectly addressed blocks for several years.
Addressing errors exist in various parts of the city, offficials say.
“We haven’t identified fully all the areas that will be impacted, but we will be impacting some with readdressing,” City Manager Craig Martin said.
Development forces some readdressing. For example, Martin’s parents’ home has been readdressed at least twice since 1975.
The city has not identified it for readdressing, but among the oddities in street naming and addressing are the 2000 blocks of Long Street, in the area of Mountain View Drive. Among them are addresses in the 4000 range, which should not exist west of 40th Avenue.