For Islanders, New Addresses Will Come Before Enhanced 911 Service
By Ryan Schlehuber

Residents and business owners on Mackinac Island probably will not receive letters informing them of their address until after the summer is over, and being provided with enhanced 911 emergency service will take even longer. City officials need to pair each building and apartment with a numbered address and then send letters to property owners, something Mayor Margaret Doud said may take another season to complete.

Once that is finished, the Mackinac County 911 coordinator will work with SBC Ameritech to match each 847 telephone exchange number with its new address. That, in itself, may take months, and, since Coordinator Pam Matelski left the post this month for a management job with the Michigan State Police in Lansing, the project may be stalled even longer.

An address system with proper names and building numbers must be implemented for the city to qualify for Mackinac County’s enhanced 911 communication system.

The rest of Mackinac County voted to implement Enhanced 911 service in November 1998, but Mackinac Island didn’t join the system until October 2002. For the time being, it is receiving basic 911 service, though each telephone line is being charged $2.21 per month, the same rate other county communities pay for enhanced 911. The rate will not change once enhanced 911 is implemented on the Island.

With basic service, callers to 911 are connected to the Michigan State Police central dispatch center in Negaunee, but need to provide details of their location and how to reach it. Since Mackinac Island has no addressing system, that can be a problem, especially for visitors.

With enhanced 911 and a new address system, the location and even medical alerts for that location will automatically come up on the dispatcher’s screen, so emergency units on the Island can be dispatched quickly, even if the caller is unable to talk.

Mayor Doud said the city committee reviewing preliminary address maps may not get much done this spring, since everyone is preoccupied preparing for the beginning of the Island’s summer tourism season.

Ms. Matelski said before she left that the task of finding the owner for each Island phone number will be difficult, especially in the case of fax numbers and multiple phone numbers for one place.

SBC will provide the county with a list of billing addresses so the new coordinator can contact each telephone owner. Many billing addresses may be off the Island, however, which could lengthen the process.

“We will take the easy ones first, obviously,” Ms. Matelski said. “There’s also the possibility that multiple numbers for one person will be under different names. This is going to take a lot of time, but there are always some snags in a process like this. One positive thing is that many people on the Island we will be working with will be familiar with the names or even phone numbers we come across, making the process quicker.”

The process has always been expected to be a long one, said Ms. Matelski.

“The city’s not dragging their feet on this,” she said. “They would like to wait to send out the letters when everyone is on the Island.

“Implementing an address system on the Island was a unique task because the Island didn’t even have all of its roads named,” she said. “There was a lot more involved, compared to what a typical numbering system would have been.”

The building numbers that will be assigned are not negotiable, since they are already in place on the city’s official address map, which was created by Lange Enterprise of Wisconsin. Each address is based on a grid system Lange Enterprise used to plot each building, apartment, and even landmarks on a map, using advanced Geographic Information System (GIS) technology.

People will continue to have mail delivered to the post office.

The new addresses will, however, make it easier to have packages delivered to homes and businesses, and to hook up cable television, telephone service, or other utilities.

Islanders will also be able to provide a legitimate address for their driver’s licenses and voter identification cards.

The matched addresses and phone numbers will be approved by SBC and then given to Negaunee Central Dispatch, the Upper Peninsula’s 911 headquarters. At that point, SBC will be in charge of updating Island phone numbers.