Preparation work is underway for the renaming of Grandin, for when the neighbourhood will officially be known as The Gardens at the beginning of September. Council voted in March to rename all municipal assets bearing the Grandin name to The Gardens.
St. Albert's managing director of corporate emergency services, Diane McMordie, is managing the project. She said the first thing they assessed was the impacts on residents and the city to ensure the transition could go smoothly.
"Really our No. 1 goal was to support residents living on those roads that were going to have an address change, to make the change as easy as possible for them," McMordie said. "We do recognize that there is going to be a level of effort required for people to change their addresses with multiple agencies and organizations."
She said the city has updated everybody's addresses in the city system, for items such as recreation memberships or tax and utility accounts.
The city will also send out a set of information packages, with the first set to go out on Aug. 25. Similar to a package residents may have received at various information sessions leading up to the council vote, it will detail the various agencies where people may need to update their address.
The date was chosen as a means of not having people go in and try to change their driver's licence too early.
"We didn't want people changing their addresses until after that Sept. 1 date, because nothing would recognize it before that date," McMordie said.
A second information package on Sept. 12 will include information on how to apply for the rebates the city will be providing for the cost for residents to change their driver's licence and land titles. Additionally, Canada Post will offer their mail forwarding service for one year for affected residents free of charge, McMordie said.
For affected residents who may not have internet access, the St. Albert Public Library will help residents with computer or phone access to contact required agencies. There will also be a phone number in the Aug. 25 information package residents can contact if they have questions.
McMordie said there are plans in place to get the information package available to residents via email or have city staff act as carriers, in the event of a mail strike.
Other systems and infrastructure changes
A host of other systems and infrastructure changes are also underway, including for emergency personnel as well as St. Albert transit.
A change residents and Google Maps users may have already noticed is transit stops selected on Google Maps now show the Garden Road name. This is because St. Albert Transit's data feeds into different transit applications like Google Maps, which operates on a fixed update schedule. McMordie said these changes were made on Aug. 10.
"Otherwise we would have been delayed by several months before we were allowed to update it again. So we did it a couple of weeks early. And then to make sure there was consistency, we changed the digital and onboard information on our buses so that it was saying the same information," she said.
One of the most significant updates was working with emergency services and the RCMP, such as mapping, especially while people adjust to the name change.
"It's really for this interim period until people get used to that new name," McMordie said. "There's definitely the possibility even after the name change that somebody would phone emergency services and in a panic say 'I live at such and such Grandin Road, right?' So we needed to have the ability for them to recognize both addresses through the dispatch system."
The signs for Grandin Road, Grandin Lane, and Grandin Place will be removed and replaced with new signage on Aug. 29.
