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12/18/2018 03:00 PMAnyone looking for an address on Sea Lane, Sound View Avenue, or South Cove Road in Old Saybrook should make sure to ask, “Which one?” Each of those streets has a twin.
At a public meeting on Dec. 11, selectmen and residents discussed street name changes proposed by First Selectman Carl P. Fortuna, Jr. in the hope of clearing up the double-name confusion.
In October, Fortuna sent a letter to 150 residents to notify them of his proposal and invited residents to send comments directly to him. He received 30 to 40 responses, he said, many of which could be summed up as “Why did you take so long?”
Residents wrote to relay ongoing problems caused by there being a street with an identical name elsewhere in town. Homeowners regularly redirect deliveries, with one couple reporting arriving home one day to find storm windows (not theirs) left on their property with no indication as to the company that had delivered them. Another resident complained about being charged extra fees for lost time spent finding their house. For some residents, mapping and GPS apps consistently send guests to the other street by the same name.
“We’ve driven to the other Sound View to find our packages lying on a porch there, [and] had a portable potty for a party dropped off and delivered there,” one couple reported via email.
Fortuna said that the most effective solution is to change three of the street names entirely.
“The first three letters of the name are most important” for search engine purposes, Fortuna explained. His original idea of appending “East” or “West” to a street name won’t resolve the issue as effectively as simply giving one of each set of twins an entirely new name.
The proposal has the blessing of the town’s emergency services, he said. Fire Chief Joe Johnson said that dispatchers receive communications from different systems, which often don’t have all the information.
“If you’re going to a fire alarm, the fire alarm company doesn’t know” there’s more than one street with the same name, he said. “They just say the street and then it’s really a guessing game.”
In many cases, the fire department sends firefighters or even fire trucks to both locations to ensure coverage, Johnson said.
It has yet to be determined which of the three street names will change, Fortuna said. Four of the six streets are located in beach associations and he is in the process of reaching out to beach association presidents.
The choice of which names to switch is not without controversy.
J.P. Dionne is a resident of South Cove Road—the one off Route 154 on the way to Saybrook Point. He has looked up town records and says that his South Cove Road pre-exists its twin, which is located in Knollwood Beach. An old town list of duplicate street names lists his street as South Cove Road #1 and the one in Knollwood as #2.
“One day we woke up and we were now #2 and the other one was #1,” he said. “It’s very strange.”
A resident of Dionne’s South Cove Road was born on the street and can attest that the name has been the same for 70 years, Dionne said. Dionne has surveyed his neighbors, many of whom showed up at the Dec. 11 meeting.
“On our street, we’re very adamant about staying with the original name,” he said.
Dionne also pointed out that re-naming his South Cove Road would raise the question as to why there’s a street directly across College Street called North Cove Road.
Fortuna predicts the process will take several months and that new street signs may be erected this summer. At the Dec. 11 meeting, many of the questions from residents addressed the logistics involved in changing the street names. On the very day that the street signs are changed, the updated emergency dispatch system will go live, Fortuna said.
The postmaster is also behind the name changes.
“If I send a letter to you and you used to live on Sound View Avenue, they’ll notify me, the sender, of the new address, too,” said Fortuna.
And the town attorney will file documents so that any future title searches show the changes.
“Any chain of title when you do a title search will indicate that [resident’s name] used to live in Sound View Avenue, which is now renamed [new street name]. So a title search when you go to sell your house…will see this,” Fortuna said.
Dionne said the meeting went well and, while he has obvious preferences for how the name changing should go, he said he has faith in the process. So does Fortuna.
“It will be done once and it will done right,” he said.