TRI-COUNTY — Locals struggling to have packages delivered, realtors seeking addresses to accompany property listings and first responders out on emergency calls drive the wide-ranging work of Kayse Muratori, the sole addressing authority of the Big Bend.
In her role as 911 GIS Coordinator for the Rio Grande Council of Governments (RioCOG), Muratori is working to improve mapping in the remote, vast area, long plagued by discrepancies between official and actual street addresses. Package deliveries, property sales, 911 calls, voting precincts and school district, law enforcement and hospital district boundaries all fall under Muratori’s purview.
“These are all the reasons why addressing is important,” Muratori said. “It’s not just one little thing. It’s a bunch of moving parts that make addressing basically the foundation of your communities.”
While it might seem like addressing is the responsibility of the United States Postal Service, in Texas the job falls to 24 distinct regional councils, nonprofit entities located across the state, that employ people like Muratori. “We’re kind of like the special teams for your local government,” Muratori explained. “We are quite literally here to help your local government accomplish jobs that they do not have the funding or manpower to do themselves, whether it’s grant writing or 911 services.”
Muratori is well-suited to solving the puzzle of the Big Bend’s unpaved and polyonymous roads. She grew up in the area, and has ancestors in all three counties. She’s the sole employee at the RioCOG Alpine office where she sits, surrounded by maps and a plotter, at a computer with four monitors facing a large window. She started the job around two years ago, having previously worked as a draftsman.
“I had no clue how much went into addressing and how impactful it was,” Muratori said. “The involvement with local government and my commissioners, the judges, it’s a pretty in-depth process.”
Lately, Muratori has been issuing around 100 new or revised addresses a month, often prompted by real estate changing hands or a citizen having issues receiving packages. “Something as simple as ordering something online can be a huge red flag that your address is wrong,” she said.
The spotty addressing in the area is a result of limited resources on the governmental level, where less manpower has led to less enforcement and poor record keeping, Muratori said. There’s also a history of people simply making addresses up and not following proper procedures.
The issue becomes extreme in the case of emergency response, particularly for remote, hard-to-reach places. If 911 dispatchers are unable to triangulate a caller’s location based on their cell phone signal, they rely on analog maps to find people in need, Muratori said. “The bottom line is that 911 needs to know how to find you if there’s an emergency. So if addressing doesn’t make sense, finding you doesn’t make sense,” Muratori said.
A fair amount of mapping has been accomplished in Terlingua Ranch, for example, but there are still many unknowns in the area and throughout the tri-county. “We still have a lot of locations all over the place that have no address,” Muratori said. “Those are the ones I worry about.”
Last year, Muratori located around 60 Airbnbs in and around Terlingua that lacked an address point, a grave concern for tourists visiting the area if an emergency were to occur. She is hoping to develop 911 addresses for those locations to make them safe for visitors and is working with local ranches and hunting camps to do the same.
In addition to establishing the correct 911 address, Muratori also performs quarterly tests on phones with different carriers, driving out into “the boonies” to make sure everything is working properly. She also monitors local dispatches for the Presidio and Brewster County sheriff’s offices and the Alpine Police Department.
The fact that you need a valid address in order to register to vote has helped Muratori establish more addresses, as has Big Bend Telephone’s policy that it will not set up internet service without a 911 address, and Big Bend Title’s policy that a letter from Muratori is required to secure a title.
Muratori said the RioCOG also plans to be more active in conversations regarding boundary drawing, like for school districts, moving forward. The latest maps, drawn in 2020, don’t make sense, Muratori said. In Brewster County, for example, Terlingua Ranch is technically zoned to go to Alpine ISD, even though they are geographically closer to Terlingua CSD. In Presidio County, Redford students are zoned to go to Marfa ISD, but are closer to Presidio ISD.
“GIS is the last stop before gerrymandering becomes real,” Muratori said. “So as the mappers of these regions, precincts, whatever it may be, we have the opportunity to speak up and say, ‘Hey, that doesn’t look right.’”
There’s also the matter of the U.S. Census. The RioCOG is the only approved outside data source for the census, meaning Muratori’s data will directly impact the forthcoming 2030 Census, which informs governmental aid, political representation, electoral districts and more. “We have an opportunity between now and the next count to make sure that we’ve cleaned up and made it as nice as possible so that we have accurate data that we’re sending to the Census Bureau in 2030,” Muratori said.
The 2020 U.S. Census for the area was botched, Muratori said, as RioCOG data was simply not collected and on the ground surveys were compromised due to COVID. Population undercounts in 2020 led entities in the area to rely on old data from the 2010 Census. Broadband maps are based on census data, and elections administrators are bound to it by law. “There’s so much that is impacted by census data, to have it that wrong is a problem,” Muratori said.
Naturally, one of Muratori’s regular contacts, in addition to county judges, realtors and the appraisal districts, are the local post offices. She reports all new and revised addresses to the post office once a month. But it is up to citizens to contact Muratori and the post office if they are experiencing issues.
The post office relies on letters generated by Muratori — 911 addressing letters which contain a visual of the address point and how it relates to the road as well as physical coordinates — to active mailing addresses. The post office is in charge of linking physical addresses to P.O. boxes.
Muratori said she will work with people to try and keep their existing address if it is “logical,” but if it doesn’t make sense for first responders she has to change it.
With a limited budget, Muratori has been relying on word of mouth to spread awareness about addressing services. She said she doesn’t mind visiting with people about roads and directions — often considered banal topics of conversation — and often gains historical knowledge as well as a friendly rapport through those chats.
“I am going to visit with you,” Muratori said. “I want to know about your grandkids and all that, because you are now going to go tell someone else, ‘Oh, she was great to talk to, give her a call.’”
She hopes to one day have more maps and address revision forms available online, an additional employee to help her with the workload — her ongoing projects also include mapping all of the county roads in Brewster County and helping rename 50 plus streets in Presidio — but for now it’s a one woman job.
“I just keep telling myself that it’s finite,” Muratori said. “You’re gonna get to a point someday where you get it all fixed.”
As a local she doesn’t deny part of the area’s charm are the rough roads wielding many names and remote locales. But official addresses have to be established to receive essential services.
“People like lonely places. This is one of them,” Muratori said. “At the end of the day, if you want internet in the desert, if you want to vote, if you want someone to find you in an emergency, this is the system we have created to make that all happen.”