McCutcheon said a fourperson committee will decide how to number the roads. Any road longer than 500 feet or having more than three houses will be labeled a county road. Sitting in front of a battery of computers in the historic county courthouse, Garrison plots the roads, which she occasionally has to drive out to inspect. Forest Service with aerial photos provided by the state in an attempt to map the county roads. Since August, deputy assessor Amber Garrison has been overlaying road maps from the U.S. With the help of grants from state agencies, it should be complete in about two years, Mc-Cutcheon said. She said total project cost is about $277,000. The real issue wasmoney, said Assessor Sheila McCutcheon. Newton County terrain is among the most rugged and rural in the state, but that wasn’t the reason for the delay in changing to the new system. Once the county is mapped, Johnson said, the software will calculate the addresses, so it won’t have to be done manually. He saidthat waiting until now has provided one benefit - the ability to use digital mapping software.
Johnson said the two biggest hurdles the county faces are naming the streets and mapping them. “If you have an ambulance dispatched to 3205 Newton County Road 40, that tells the driver they’re going roughly 3,205 feet down that road, to wherever they’re supposed to be,” Johnson said. He said the county is working toward having addresses based on specific locations that are sequentially numbered. Johnson said the county is moving away from postal, or highway contract routes, which don’t correspond witha physical location. “With that kind of addressing, it’s not a locatable sequence, or a system that you and I - average everyday people - could locate by.” “The current addressing they have in Newton County is still using the antiquated postal route and box or highway contract route,” said Johnson, state geographic information officer. The county is the last in the state to convert to “center line mapping,” a prerequisite to getting enhanced 911 service, said Shelby Johnson of the Arkansas Geographic Information Office.
JASPER - Ambulance drivers being able to find the business end of a 911 call is just one benefit of assigning physical addresses to every house and business in Newton County.