Marathon County’s Conservation, Planning, and Zoning Department (CPZ) will pause its Uniform Addressing project in November, when snow and frozen ground will prohibit the installation of any more street and address signposts. The project will resume installing signs in spring 2019.

The towns of Brighton, Holton, Hull, and Spencer will not receive new Uniform Addresses until next year. These four communities now join the municipalities of Berlin, Bern, Halsey, Hamburg, Johnson, Rib Falls, Rietbrock and Stettin, which the county announced earlier this fall would not be re-addressed until 2019.

Owners of property located in towns or villages participating in the Uniform Addressing project who have not yet received an official notice of address change from the county should continue to use the property’s current address for voting and all other activities (driver license renewals, check re-ordering, etc.). When the project resumes in 2019, property owners will receive an official notice from the county informing them of what their new Uniform Address will be. (For public safety reasons, new addresses cannot be released to the public before Official Notices are mailed.)
The Uniform Addressing project should not cause voter identification issues during the midterm elections on Nov. 6.

Marathon County staff have been working with the Election Board in Madison to supply poll workers with cross-reference tables of former and new (uniform) addresses that were assigned in Marathon County in 2018. This crosscheck will verify any voters who may still have a form of voter ID that lists an old address. (Residents in participating municipalities who have not yet had their address changed should continue to use their current address.)

According to Marathon County Clerk Nan Kottke, “The municipal clerks and poll workers were well prepared for the August primary, and everything went smoothly.”

A prolonged winter and a record snowfall in April caused Uniform Address sign installation to start nearly a month behind schedule. Workers from Lange Enterprises (the county’s contractor) were able to install and deliver more than 15,000 new address signs in 29 communities between May and November of this year, including: Bergen, Bevent, Cassel, Cleveland, Day, Easton, Elderon (town and village), Emmet, Eau Pleine, Frankfort, Franzen, Green Valley, Guenther, Harrison, Hewitt, Knowlton, Marathon (town), McMillan, Mosinee (town), Norrie, Plover, Reid, Ringle, Stratford (village) Texas, Wausau (town), Weston (town) and Wien.

Parents and teachers are invited to use the kid-friendly “My Address” worksheet to help children learn and practice their address — important information to know in an emergency (whether their address changed due to this countywide Uniform Addressing project or not). The two-sided activity sheet reminds children that every address is unique and is how family, friends, mail carriers, delivery drivers, firefighters and others know where they live. The children’s worksheet can be downloaded at www.MyMarathonCountyAddress.org or can be found as a hard copy page within the November update of the Residential version of the Quick Reference Guide available at area Marathon County Public Library locations.

By the end of 2019, more than 20,000 properties across Marathon County will have received new addresses and more than 600 roads will have been re-named as part of the county’s transition to a grid-based addressing system.

Marathon County was one of only four counties left in Wisconsin without a Uniform Addressing System.

The public can continue to view updates on the project at the County’s dedicated Uniform Addressing website: www.MyMarathonCountyAddress.org.