DeKalb 911 Board Votes to Re-address Alexandria Street Over Public Opposition

February 21, 2019
By: Dwayne Page

Over the objections of a few residents, members of the DeKalb County Emergency Communications District (E-911 Board) Tuesday night voted 6 to 1 to re-address East Main Street in Alexandria.

The action came during a special called meeting of the board requested by First District County Commissioner Dennis Slager on behalf of a group of Alexandria residents opposed to the address changes. A petition was also presented to the board signed by Alexandria citizens on the street in opposition. In addition to Slager, Danny and Pat Parkerson and Thurman Seber, who reside on East Main Street addressed the board.

The DeKalb County Emergency Communications District (E-911 Board) is authorized by the state to assign addresses and to make changes when necessary to conform with state standards for 911 mapping.

Brad Mullinax, Director of the DeKalb Emergency Communications District, said the changes for East Main Street are part of a county wide effort to make corrections and add numbers in areas where there aren’t enough. He said 416 address changes have already been made across the county within the last five years and more changes will be made as problems are discovered. “We have to send addresses to the state and they validate them and send them back for correction if there is a problem. We have already had to re-address Avant Circle, Curtis Avenue, Edgewood, Fleming, High Street, and Lavergne Streets in Alexandria and there are more we will have to do,” said Mullinax.

Mullinax said East Main Street in Alexandria, like many others across the county, is not addressed properly. “We do not arbitrarily go through and start changing people’s addresses. The previous standard for addressing this area did not allow for enough addresses. We have had this same problem in Smithville. This is a problem that is widespread and we are correcting them as we find them. In this case there is some development going on along East Main Street and we must plan for that,” said Mullinax.

According to Mullinax, the state requires that street addresses be assigned based on the length of the road rather than lots. “The way we are directed by the state through the 911 addressing standards is to assign an address for every 5.28 feet. The total length of East Main Street is 3,214 feet. If you take the 3,214 feet and divide that by 5.28 feet we should have a range of about 610 numbers on this street. Generally we do not address in single or double digit numbers. We start with a 100 block and work our way up so the range for this particular street is 100 to 710 is what it should be. East Main Street starts near the public square to Brush Creek Road. The address numbers are currently 100 to 220 so we’re about 400 numbers short of having enough addresses to service the area. All these were addressed incorrectly,” he continued.

“That doesn’t even make sense to me (addresses for every 5.28 feet),” said Slager.

“That gets you 1,000 addresses per mile so let’s say you are driving out Cookeville Highway and if everything is addressed properly and you get to 2,000 Cookeville Highway you know you are two miles out the road and that’s the reason it is done that way. Its 1,000 addresses per mile,” added 911 employee Tony Thomas.

Mullinax said potential addressing issues exist on both sides of East Main Street unless they are corrected. There is a huge piece of property on the north side of East Main Street that is being developed. There are houses under construction there. Some have already been completed or are near completion and some have not been completed but we are under the impression that much more of it will be developed in the near future,” he said.

“There is also no room on the south side of East Main Street as well. If you start a building behind your house, garage, or any kind of out building that requires electricity, the Middle Tennessee Electric Corporation requires you get a second number. They will not address off your house and won’t set a meter unless you get a separate number,” Mullinax continued.

Although addressing is done for postal and shipping purposes, Mullinax said the greater reason is to make sure emergency services can pinpoint the location of residences when a call for help comes in.

“Many of our EMS personnel come from other counties to work here in DeKalb County and they don’t know the people who live on these roads. It’s essential we try to get this as correct as possible. I know it is not popular and I wish we didn’t have to do this but its for the best,” said Mullinax.

Slager asked the board to consider another option. “The chances of subdividing these properties on the south side of East Main Street is slim to none because these are small lots and the chances of additional meters for these houses are pretty slim too because most people don’t want two light bills. Why not leave these people alone on their addresses and concentrate on fixing the new?. You have the space and numbers to correspond north versus south. I wish you would consider that for this section. I can’t see how this would be damaging to the citizens when the addresses on the northside will line up and correspond with the south side. To me it’s a common sense approach and it would probably only affect sixteen lots,” said Slager.

“We did consider that option,” said Mullinax, but the problem is more and more people are dropping their landline telephones. Twenty years ago this would not have been a problem because when you call 911 from your house with a landline, it gives us the actual address point associated with your house. In recent years people have ditched their landlines and gone to cheaper alternatives such as a cell phone or voice over IP. These services do not provide us that same type of location data to pinpoint the address associated with your house. Rather, it calculates a location based on the length of the road so if your address comes in as 114 East Main Street and you are calculated as being at 258 East Main Street then it’s going to plot that address way down the road from where you actually live based on the length of the road. A lot of the GPS devices in our ambulances work off the same mechanism. They don’t work off address point data. They work off length of the road data so there is a potential  for an emergency responder being delayed getting to a resident’s house. We decided it would be best to do it all correctly and readdress the entire street and move forward,” said Mullinax.

Asked if special notes could be added to the data system for current addresses without re-numbering them, Mullinax responded saying “we don’t have a way to put notes in the system on a cellular phone call and if we put a note in there for landlines it could create a little bit of a liability issue for a dispatcher. They would be charged with having to go and look back in a note history to check footage but on a cell phone that is not possible,” added Mullinax.

“You have already created a liability issue for every house in DeKalb County that has not changed over. If you go to this (new numbers) and (first responders) go to 116 East Main and its now 247 and they can’t find it they are lost too. Who is going to be liable for that if they don’t show up at the right house? The times I have used 911 I’ve called and said my porch light will be on,” said Danny Parkerson.

Mullinax was also asked if letters of the alphabet could be added to the existing addresses without changing the entire numbers. “The problem with that is we have a data based driven system and it works off numbers. You can’t put a letter in a number field so for example an A or B will not come up in an address because its for numbers. We do use letters with apartment complexes but those addresses are in units under one roof such as building A-B-C-D.  For example if we dispatched to 740 Walker Drive apartment A1 then they (first responders) know to go to the A building and look for apartment 1. That is different than responding to single residential homes,” said Mullinax.

“This is a small county and other than Smithville there is not another town in our county that compares to anything in Wilson County or anywhere else. I talked to three people with Wilson County’s 911 and they told me they never tear up a street if possible. I understand what you’re saying about footage but the person I talked to from Wilson County 911 said they do not do it (footage) in town,” said Pat Parkerson.

“We’re not talking about the country (rural areas) we’re talking about the city of Alexandria,” said Danny Parkerson

“Danny what you have to understand is I can’t address Alexandria, Dowelltown, and Liberty different that I do the county. We have to do it all the same. It has to be uniform,” answered Mullinax.

911 Board members voting to re-address the entire length of East Main Street in Alexandria were Brandon Cox, Sabrina Farler, Jerry Scott, Josh Tramel, Billy Adcock, and Jeff Barnes. Chris Russell voted no.

February 20, 2019
By: Dwayne Page

A DeKalb County High School senior learned last week that she has been named a Finalist for the National Merit Scholarship Program.

IMG_4342 from dwayne page on Vimeo.

Madison Elizabeth  (Madi) Cantrell, daughter of Todd and Jenny Cantrell, who qualified as one of 16,000 Semifinalists nationwide for this honor last fall is now among thousands of Finalists. The National Merit® Scholarship Program awards individual students who show exceptional academic ability and potential for success in rigorous college studies.

National Merit Scholarships worth more than $31 million will be offered this spring. About half of the Finalists will win a National Merit Scholarship, earning the Merit Scholar® title.

A variety of information is available for NMSC selectors to evaluate: the Finalist’s academic record, information about the school’s curricula and grading system, two sets of test scores, the high school official’s written recommendation, information about the student’s activities and leadership, and the Finalist’s own essay.

Beginning in March and continuing to mid-June, NMSC will notify the finalists at their home addresses if they are selected to receive a Merit Scholarship^® award.

Madi is the 2018-19 Miss DCHS and she participates in various school clubs, including FBLA, Student Government, and Senior Beta Club, where she currently serves as president. She is also the treasurer of the 2019 senior class. She served as the Junior Usher for the Class of 2018, alongside Mr. DCHS, and earned the AP Scholar with Distinction award. She was voted Outstanding Underclassman during her Freshman and Sophomore years and attended Girls State in the summer of 2018. Madi has joined the prestigious 29+ club which recognizes students with an ACT score of 29 or higher. Upon graduation, Madi plans to study chemical engineering.

NMSC, a not-for-profit organization that operates without government assistance, was established in 1955 specifically to conduct the annual National Merit Scholarship Program. Scholarships are underwritten by NMSC with its own funds and by approximately 410 business organizations and higher education institutions that share NMSC’s goals of honoring the nation’s scholastic champions and encouraging the pursuit of academic excellence.

Over 1.6 million juniors in about 22,000 high schools entered the 2019 National Merit Scholarship Program by taking the 2017 Preliminary SAT/National Merit Scholarship Qualifying Test (PSAT/NMSQT®), which served as an initial screen of program entrants. The nationwide pool of Semifinalists, representing less than one percent of U.S. high school seniors, included the highest scoring entrants in each state. To become a Finalist, the Semifinalist and his or her high school had to submit a detailed scholarship application, in which they provided information about the Semifinalist’s academic record, participation in school and community activities, demonstrated leadership abilities, employment, and honors and awards received. A Semifinalist must also have an outstanding academic record throughout high school, be endorsed and recommended by a high school official, write an essay, and earn SAT® scores that confirm the student’s earlier performance on the qualifying test.

February 20, 2019
By: Dwayne Page

Investigators have wrapped up their probe into the death of a woman whose body was found on a cold and rainy night in November in the backyard of a residence on Parkway Drive in Smithville.

According to District Attorney General Bryant Dunaway, 28 year old Jessica Whitworth Stephens of Woodbury was the victim of an accidental death caused by a combination of drug toxicity and hypothermia.

“Investigators looked into the circumstances of her death and what we have been waiting for as the missing piece of the investigation is the report of the medical examiner. The autopsy report. We just recently received that back and the medical examiner’s office has determined that the cause of death is the combination of the presence of drugs in her system as well as hypothermia. It was a rainy and cold night when she was found and she was found outdoors exposed to the elements so the manner of death ruled by the medical examiner is an accident so there will be no further investigation on our part. There appears to be no crime. It’s just an accidental death caused by a combination of drug toxicity and hypothermia,” said Dunaway in a statement to WJLE by telephone Wednesday morning.

Stephens’ body was found on Monday, November 12 in a backyard on Parkway Drive near Federal Mogul. Through fingerprints, investigators were able to identify her.

The case was investigated by the DeKalb County Sheriff’s Department, Tennessee Bureau of Investigation, and the District Attorney Generals Office.