Road name change on agenda

MONTAGUE – Prior to the development of the 9-1-1 emergency phone network, and in the absence of any city or county guidelines on naming streets and roads, developers could assign whatever name they wished to a proposed road.

As a result, there are oftentimes more than one “Oak,” “Elm” “First” streets, roads or lanes in the county. Utilizing a computer system that assigns a U.S Postal Service Zip Code to each telephone land line helped eliminate some of the confusion.

But then cell phones came along.

Monday Pct. 3 Road & Bridge Commissioner Mark Murphey advised the commissioner’s court that he was about to advertise a road name change to avoid confusion.

“This is a little piece of a road I have over in northwest Montague County about 300 yards long, and we (already) have a Jackson Road (near Bowie) and we have a Jackson Street (in Nocona),” the commissioner pointed out.

“What I’m going to do is advertise this according to the statute and change this to Womble Road,” he informed the court. “I’ve already talked to Bob Bass (the county’s governmental affairs attorney) and I’ve already talked to Nortex (Regional Planning Commission which operates 9-1-1 office).

“We’ll have the public hearing on Oct. 28 at the regular commissioner’s court meeting.

“The main thing was to avoid confusion. The address, we don’t have anybody living on that road yet, but we’re fixing to. So now if you have a Jackson Road, and a Jackson Street and now a Jackson Lane UPS gets confused, 9-1-1 dispatchers get confused,” he explained.

“The main thing, if you’re writing about this, the people on Jackson Road to be all freaking out because there’s a lot of people living over there and don’t want to them thinking we’re changing their road name,” Murphey stressed.