By Rodd Cayton
Several organizations rank Corrales among the safest places to live in New Mexico and village leaders are seeking to increase that status by making sure emergency responders can get to residents as quickly as possible.
In his weekly message to the community, Mayor Fred Hashimoto wrote that the Village Council will be discussing ways to fix street addresses in Corrales. He wrote that a 2009 study found as many as 20% of the addresses in the village fall into “error” categories. Those include numbers on the wrong side of the road (example, an odd-numbered address on the western side of Corrales Road), house numbers out of numerical sequence, or a house addressed on the wrong road (where the street address isn’t where responders would find the front door).
Those errors, he wrote, have caused confusion for public safety workers, who have occasionally spent precious time driving back and forth hunting for a house to be queried about what took them so long to arrive. The fire department, Hashimoto wrote, responds to about 85 medical calls a month.
Village planning and zoning administrator Laurie Stout told the Corrales Comment that before she was employed by the Village, the issue was obvious to her. “Delivery drivers would see me out working in the front yard and ask where certain addresses were, along my street,” she said, noting that addresses are out of order and odd and even house numbers are on the same side of the street.
Stout said Sandoval County officials nine years ago decided to no longer accept new Corrales addresses unless the village assigned responsibility for them to one person; she became the custodian of addressing.
“When folks take a vacant lot and decide to build, an address now gets assigned at the permit stage,” she said. “When a new subdivision is platted, I can assign addresses to all lots up front.”
As far as Stout can tell, no one in Corrales was assigning addresses, and property owners and contractors were just picking their own addresses. In other cases, she said a resident might have originally owned a number of acres along Corrales Road, with the house set far back from the roadway. “They had (and in many cases still have) a Corrales Road address, but in the intervening years sold off many acres,” Stout said. “That land got subdivided into lots with a new named road heading east or west from Corrales Road. So, you still have citizens with Corrales Road addresses but are now off other named roads.”
Fire Chief Anthony Martinez gave Nobles Lane as an example. He said the last home on that road had a Corrales Road address, but it’s been updated. He said paramedics have other means of finding a home, but that having an updated address will allow them to reach a patient more quickly. Martinez said residents can help responders by ensuring their house numbers and street signs are visible.
Stout said she’s happy to change a residence address and update the Sandoval County Assessor’s office,the Post Office, emergency services and the Corrales police and fire departments. She also puts the new address on the state’s NM911 map and provides the requestor with a letter for the title company, utilities and others. The village charges nothing for those services.
Other Sandoval County municipalities, she said, have seen similar problems, with the Town of Bernalillo recently adopting an addressing ordinance.
“I asked (Bernalillo planning and zoning director Rebecca Bolen) how the citizens felt about it, and she said they seemed to understand the need,” Stout said. “Hopefully if the Village of Corrales can pass a similar ordinance we’ll have a similar reaction.”