The town of Glen Haven isn’t really a town, according to the powers that be in Larimer County.
This has come as something of a surprise to the several hundred people who live in the community, which has been known as Glen Haven for more than a century. They get mail from the Glen Haven post office. They serve on Glen Haven’s volunteer fire department. And they shop at the Glen Haven General Store.
The identity of the mountain hamlet is at issue because Larimer County officials have undertaken an addressing project. The county’s broad motives are benevolent; officials want to make sure unnamed roads get monikers, and street addresses have sequential numbers. That’s important for emergency responders trying to find a location.
But somehow little Glen Haven has gotten squeezed in the process. In a fit of bureaucratic inflexibility, county employees have refused to allow Glen Haven to retain its mailing-address identity.
Because Glen Haven is not incorporated and is not served by door-to-door mail delivery, county staffers have told residents they’ll likely get the mailing address of either nearby Drake or Estes Park.
Residents are upset, and we don’t blame them.
Part of the issue is that Glen Haven addresses are not in a database maintained by the U.S. Postal Service. The database is the industry standard, used in emergency response and deliveries.
But U.S. Postal Service officials say they would happily amend their database to include a grid of Glen Haven street addresses if Larimer County requested it.
“As far as we’re concerned, Glen Haven, Colorado, is a perfectly acceptable address,” said Jim Wilson, program manager for the office of address management. “We don’t like to take away community identity and names.”
That’s not how Larimer officials see it. Karlin Goggin, a building department official working on the project, said: “You just don’t allow individuals to call themselves whatever they want.”
That leaves us wondering, why not? The name has worked for 103 years. Residents are campaigning to keep it. And federal officials say they’ll help make it happen. The only ingredient missing is a little flexibility from county officials. It’s not too much to ask.
