Assessor will no longer issue alpha character addresses

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A Newsletter by the City of Saco, Maine	April, 2009	Return to newsletter index

Most taxpayers are not aware that one of the many duties of the City of Saco Assessor is to assign a physical street address to parcels. A physical street address is usually first assigned to a parcel when a building permit is issued for a lot. Once a physical street address has been issued to a lot, the Assessor's Office will notify the Enhanced 9-1-1 Emergency Services Communications Bureau, the United States Postal Service as well as all other city departments.

Through the years, some Saco land owners have split a portion of their parcel to create one or more new parcels. Some of these new parcels became known as "back lots". Starting back in 19?? when "back lots" started to be zoned, the City had no idea how many potential lots would be allowed to split. As more and more lots were split, Saco began to run out of consecutive physical address numbers to assign to them. At that time, the solution was to assign an "alpha character" to the physical address. For example, if a preexisting lot had a physical street address of 8 Main Street and a portion of that lot was split to create a new lot, then the address for the new lot would have been 8R Main Street (if no other consecutive numbers were available.)

Until recently, the assigning of alpha characters within the physical street address seemed to work. However, a few months ago, the Assessor's Office was notified by the United States Postal Service that their U.S.P.S. database would no longer recognize addresses with alpha characters. The reason for this is because the mail meter machine will now read an alpha character as a postal code instead of an address. Therefore the post office would consider an alpha number address to be a secondary address off of a primary address, much like apartment number. This means that mail intended for the person living at 8R Main Street would be delivered at 8 Main Street.

Due to this address issue, the Assessor has come up with three solution options which are:

The first option would be to reassign a lot a new address if there happens to be a gap in the numbering sequence. (There are very few that fall under this option).
The second option is to legally assign a name to pre-existing private rights of way which have three or more developed parcels that abut the private lane or way. For those parcels with "alpha character" address that fall into this option, the Assessor's Office is writing to the owners of the abutting parcels to make them aware that collectively, they may petition the City to "name the private way." The Assessor will then issue street numbers for said road. It will be the sole responsibility of the owners to maintain a street sign at the entrance to the private way in accordance with the current Public Works standards for other public and private road signs. The name of the private way cannot conflict or sound similar to existing road names in Saco. As a last resort, if the abutters cannot collectively agree on a name for the right of way, then the Saco City Council will assign a name and the Assessor will assign new physical addresses accordingly.
The third option is to reassign address numbers to a portion of a street, or for the entire street where "alpha character" addresses exist.

Upon learning of this address situation, the Assessor's Office searched the data base and generated a report to show how many parcels Saco had with alpha character addresses. The report showed that Saco had a total of seventy two (72) parcels. At this time, the Assessor's Office has reassigned nine parcels with new addresses of the seventy two. This address issue is not a quick fix however the Assessor's Office is diligently working to resolve the issue on a case by case basis, one address at a time.