Council approves address bylaw

Property owners in Lethbridge will now need to identify their addresses on the front and rear of their buildings, if they border an alley, with a new bylaw approved on Monday by city council.

The Municipal Naming and Addressing Bylaw (Bylaw 6049) was developed by the City of Lethbridge to provide consistency and avoid confusion for residents, service providers and emergency responders.

Residential, commercial and industrial property owners are now required to have address numbers plainly visible on the front of their homes and buildings.

If the property borders an alley, a new requirement calls for address numbers to be plainly displayed on the rear of their properties. Properties with no rear lane are exempt from the rear address requirement.

The address numbers must be no less than 10 centimetres (four inches) in height, and must be visible from the road or alley with no obstructions.

Property owners will have 24 months to comply with the requirements. City administration is working on a plan to get the word out to property owners through social media and written correspondence.

There is a $250 fine for non-compliance, having the wrong address displayed, or failing to maintain the address numbers. The fine increases to $500 on second offence and $1,000 on third and subsequent offences.

Until now, the City of Lethbridge did not have a bylaw to define the processes for proper, effective naming and addressing of properties. Most Alberta cities including Calgary, Edmonton, Red Deer and St. Albert already have a similar bylaw.

“The Naming and Addressing Bylaw will not only help the City of Lethbridge regulate the placement of addresses but will also help avoid confusion, inefficiencies and potential life safety issues in emergency response situations,” said Mayor Chris Spearman in a press release.

In the past, individual City departments had to maintain their own independent property address databases. This resulted in City departments having various addresses on file for the same property and caused confusion for municipal service providers, as well as the public and private contractors.

Over the past year, Planning and Development Services has worked with all City departments to co-ordinate the creation of a central address database.

As this cleanup effort continues, this database will be available to all City departments as well as emergency service providers, utility providers and external agencies such as Canada Post. As a result, the City has established processes and procedures to ensure that addressing is done consistently and systematically.

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