GRAND FORKS CITY COUNCIL: Backyard Chicken Ban Deferred for the Time Being

GRAND FORKS, ND (trfnews.i234.me) The Grand Forks City Council killed an ordinance that would ban backyard chickens. The existing rules may still face some changes later this month.
[Applause] 4.3 introduce ordinance relating to prohibited animals and exceptions 11-0216 and 11.0217 also attached our citizen comments that have come in regarding this item thank you alex i got a few speaker cards i wonder what you guys okay with here in the speakers first then we’ll go from there so i’ll list out the speaker cards if anyone isn’t on this and wants to speak after that um certainly step up to the mic but you’ve got uh three minutes we try to keep it to that if possible i’m just going to go on the order i got them here so if suzanne nelson is ready she could step up to the lucky you you get to go first huh right yeah great thank you appreciate your time i understand you’re very busy and i’m not sure when we were celebrating fourth of july we would be talking about chickens on tuesday so with that said my name is suzanne nelson i was born and raised on a farm in the texas panhandle i’ve lived in grand forks on 8th street since 2009 with my husband and two daughters i learned some facts doing a crash course of chickens i know chickens because i’ve lived on a farm but urban chicken specifically for example did you know that chickens cluck at 65 decibels that’s about on par with the conversation dogs for example bark at 100 decibels i also learned there is a website that’s completely dedicated to city planning it’s called planning.org and they have a whole section just on urban livestock in that section are the documents that i emailed earlier today thank you for helping me with that one is a document from the environmental law institute in washington dc the other is from a university in new york overall there are two points that i want to address first is regarding chicken specifically and the second is the process to determine solutions so for the chickens the documents will detail um some of the concerns that have been raised regarding chickens chickens are not shown to spread diseases any more so than any other what we would consider a normal pet such as a bearded dragon a dog a cat they’re also not shown to depreciate property value which i think is another concern raised by constituents and grand forks in fact despite the fact that google searches have increased dramatically for urban chickens since the beginning of the pandemic i was unable to locate a single documented instance where chickens have depreciated the value there’s a lot more detail in the document so i’ll leave at that for you to review at your leisure i know there’s a lot of information in there but all of the information is also cited in the documents themselves secondly from an overall standpoint i don’t have an opinion on the chickens i don’t know what the best solution is i will say though that i was a bit alarmed at how this came to pass it came the appearance is that this was decided on by the council members and a handful of grand forks constituents i don’t think this is something that the greater grand forks community agrees with in general i had the i had the opportunity to speak to president sandy as well as councilman weber earlier today i really appreciate the time on a very busy day to speak to me about this um i would urge the council if they’re not already doing so to consider some sort of prioritization matrix or a root caused solution based mechanism when trying to determine solutions for problems that constituents raise um i think that this is a really hard job you guys have to constantly balance the needs and wants of a few with the many and that’s not always easy to do for this specific case i don’t believe this is egregious enough for an all-out ban i don’t see anything that indicates that this is what the greater grand forks population wants i don’t see any sort of public health or safety concern that was immediately raised regarding the specifics and only chickens that we have in grand forks that are licensed and i would strongly urge usc authority to consider alternatives as opposed to an all-out ban i know this seems like a small problem and it might have bigger problems but i think that the overall issue is warranted further consideration thanks all right thank you miss nelson we’ve got sarah willardson hi um again i want to thank you also for your time in hearing this i think you’re gonna see there’s probably a lot of people that were interested in chickens that didn’t know they could get them as i think the permits are showing um i was the only chicken permit holder as of last week i understand so um and i reside in mr sandy’s ward so i’m kind of i don’t want to say i’m taking it personal but i definitely feel this was about my chickens um i was unaware of any complaints prior to your meeting so i did i reached out to mr sandy and tried to find out what is the reason my chickens you know why why don’t you want chickens in town um and i honestly i don’t feel i’ve gotten any reason other than some people just don’t feel they belong in town they should be on a farm which is an opinion and i guess that’s everyone has a right to opinion we have things that our neighbors do all the time that we don’t agree with um i don’t feel it’s the right for us to tell our neighbors what they can and can’t do though unless there is a true reason that it’s disturbing us so i think we ended on agree to disagree is how it came about i also talked to public health and my understanding was there was no formal complaints against me although there had been some checking into as far as if they could enforce an hoa in my area which that dissolved back in 2010 so there is no hoa in my area that would not permit that so um i think she created some really great points of what they are for um there’s an article in the herald about my son we got these as a pandemic project you know he was home from school he’s always wanted chickens he’s like mom i’m home and i’m like you can’t have chickens in town but he did the work he looked it up on public health mom i can i got to get this permit we called public health he went to the neighbors and asked them can i have them you know are you okay with this they gave it okay we got the chickens we’ve raised them from little chicks in our garage starting you know in a brooder it was a family project we built the coop farm that’s insulated obviously our winters where we didn’t know how we were going to do this and it’s been a great family project they’ve been a really fun animal which is not what i expected they’re like you know they they’re contained i’m in a privacy fence you know i guess the change is going to having urban chickens that is just what we’re seeing more and more um and i feel that not allowing them actually prohibiting isn’t really fair i think there is a way we can work together to come to a common ground as far as there needs to be rules in place obviously they need to be contained but as far as prohibiting him i think that was going a little too far so that’s all i have any questions for me owning chickens thank you any questions since she offered any questions okay thank you thank you [Applause] how do you get applause like that i want to get one of those sometimes james carney thanks for the time council i’m here in opposition of rewriting the city ordinance regarding foul in the city um i guess we were one of 10 permanent holders in the last 10 years i did not know we didn’t have a permit we got a letter from renewal i just haven’t sent it in yet because it still gave me a window to turn that in but we do have chickens on our property we do live within city limits i’ve had no problems with my neighbors to my knowledge i keep a good relationship with them i ask them on a regular basis if there’s any problems with our chickens if there’s anything at all and we address them immediately when we did the permit process we were surprised how easy it was simply because you know one we didn’t realize there was a permit two was a simple email i think previous permits were simply we emailed saying we have chickens they emailed back saying get consent from your neighbors we have two neighbors no neighbors behind us we love we back up against demurs got their permission with no problems we even actually asked them before we even knew there was a permit so we tried to do the neighborly thing asking i would hope they would say something if there was a problem but our chickens have we’ve had them a little over a year now there we have currently eight chickens we originally started with six we got a couple more and they live in an enclosure in the backyard that enclosure is cleaned regularly we’ve done our homework on how to keep them clean because we don’t want to spread disease we don’t want to have odor we don’t want to be a problem and we’ve done our best to prevent that and we sit in our backyard all the time no odors nothing our dogs a lot of the air conditioning unit is louder we made sure not to get roosters roosters are loud they wake people up it’s an alarm clock so we don’t we didn’t do that the owners does not provide any guidance on roosters we took it upon ourselves let’s not have that annoyance out there we don’t want it so why would our neighbors want it um an outright ban does seem a bit much i think there’s uh i think it’s a big step completely removing that from the ordinance the exception the exemption that chickens do have uh did seem like a big step i don’t think there’s a single person up here that wants chickens that wants them banned outright or free reign i don’t think anyone in town is trying to build a commercial operation with chickens it’s also in the ordinance that you can’t do that but i don’t think that’s anyone’s intent with backyard chickens our intent was to have something our daughter can take care of and grow and learn responsibility and it was something that we enjoyed doing the chickens are surprisingly a good time they’re easy to take care of we have two dogs dogs don’t care in the slice about the chickens we actually have wild dogs that came from a deployment and that was our biggest concern the dogs are going to get riled up they haven’t the only thing that has been an issue with our chickens was an owl never saw that coming our coop is uh currently surrounded with cattle fence up and over so nothing’s really getting in there i didn’t really plan on threats from the air but now it did get in fix that problem i haven’t seen the allison’s we’ve had no problem so uh i think along with everyone else we’re happy to work on compromise figure our way forward but i am opposed to rewriting the city ordinance thank you thank you mr carney [Applause] c.t marvula [Applause] thank you mayor and members of the council the irony is that i’m amazed no one has remarked on it today is happy fried chicken day in the united states so the subject is appropriate uh as you can still i’m an honorary colonel awarded this honor by general bruce guard of the gilbee militia that doesn’t have a lot of sway once you’re outside gilby but mayors members of the council and fellow patriots i had a dickens-like experience last night i try and travel through three different periods of history and as you ponder the seriousness of this life or death decision before you thomas paine asked me to pass on some advice these are times that tribe and souls said pain he’s confident you will find the inner strength to deal with the seriousness of this issue next i found myself with robert kennedy he also offered some advice he stated some people ask why did the chicken cross the road he replied i dream of a better world where the chicken can cross the road where their motive is not questioned that is the dream of robert kennedy why should we question the motive of the chicken crossing the road and my third stop in my dickens like experience was in a birmingham jail with a young martin luther king together we worked on the first draft of his famous letter does it matter what came first the chicken or the egg asked king and then he added his famous quote i pray for the day when all chickens whether born from a brown shell or a white chill will be judged by the tenderness on the grill not the color of their shell i do believe he edited some for the final draft and then as i awoke i thought of two generally accepted great movies that ever were made citizen kane a classic by orson welles and chicken run by peter lord who could ever forget that memorial memorable quote by mr tweed tweety mrs tweedy the chickens are revolting members i’m someone who knows a thing or two about chickens i urge you not to clock up this young man’s entrepreneurial spirit this is a slippery slope next animal control will be coming from mr chandler’s birdie who knows peta may well kidnap our own umd hawk and hold it for ransom in fargo these chickens have names lena steli betty honey golden and clucker do not call a foul on them f-o-u-l on this young gentleman’s legal fall f-o-w-l set the fork’s fabulous five falls free thank you thank you mr marhula so is there no one else is there anyone else that wants to speak on this matter all right i think we can wrap that up and i’ll open up the council for comment mr sandy please miss mayor thank you i have a lot of time to talk turkey with my wife and several other people spent a lot of time defending my position on this issue miss willardson and i had a very nice visit actually ms nelson and i had a very nice visit today as well my concern um never was about the any of the current chickens that are in our community my concern is whether our community in general feels that chickens should be part of our part of our residential life or not my my feeling was and still is chickens are a farm animal and in my opinion belong on a farm and don’t belong inside city limits however i’ve heard from lots of people that think chickens are great i don’t know if there are enough votes because i i haven’t been asking council members their opinions that the two conversations i had with council members um i think they would even attest to the fact that i haven’t been making calls trying to get people to support a ban on chickens because that wasn’t what this was about for me this was about having the conversation and um an open conversation about why we have chickens currently in our in our in our city and if it is a reasonable approach so my discussion with the other two council members were related to um if there aren’t the votes then perhaps we should look to tighten up the current ordinance it wasn’t about me lobbying for people to change their opinions or even trying to impose my opinion on anyone else i think and i’ve always stated that the all the council members are elected for their opinion and we should be able to provide our opinions openly at will regardless of whether people agree or disagree because that’s why we are elected and so my constituents weren’t happy about what was going on in their neighborhood which educated me on the fact that there are chickens in grand forks and as i mentioned before i didn’t know which is why i can fully and confidently say this has nothing to do with this young man’s chickens i didn’t even know he had chickens i didn’t know there were chickens in our community until i found out from a neighbor and so therefore i i started asking the questions quite some time about ago about whether other council members agreed that chickens should be part of our our community i i’ll and if if it dies for lack of a second i’m not going to have any hard feelings i’ll make a motion to approve the ordinance as drafted by the city attorney thank you president sand you have a second thank you mayor so i would make the suggestion if i may mr mayor that we would uh um knowing that there there isn’t an appetite to ban chickens from the city um i would suggest that we should take a look at the ordinance as it sits and perhaps change some of the language to add a a limit to the number of chickens that would be allowed and um in addition to that and i’m not sure i’m not sure what that number should be i’ve heard from some people that have chickens that it should be as few as two i’ve heard from mr badard that perhaps six or eight is is reasonable i don’t know what that number is and that certainly uh should be up for debate but i do believe we should set a limit rather than having having that open-ended um and then i would suggest that um in addition to all adjacent properties being notified i think we should change it from from 75 feet back to the 200 feet that it was in 2008 and i don’t think it should be measured from the chicken coop i think it should be measured from the property line where the chickens may be wandering but that’s uh that’s just my opinion on it so i’m i’m i’m not going to make that motion i’ll leave that up for other people to debate thank you mayor thank you i guess my thoughts would be in order to not you know go back and have to do this again and have another conversation is that is there a council member that would want to move to adding it to 200 feet and setting a limit six to eight somewhere in there for chickens or do you want to wait and have this uh further looked at another uh introduction of an ordinance i’m happy to if somebody has a and a friendly amendment that they want to make on the current language i’m happy to move it forward tonight certainly vice president mark um i wonder if it would be something that we should say all adjacent property owners should be notified as opposed to either 200 feet and all adjacent property owners or if we could just leave it as adjacent property owners so that they could be informed [Music] mr kalami but a couple of comments i agree i think that 200 feet from i like the idea of wherever the chickens can have access to but i think 200 feet from that could be two houses over potentially and are they going to be affected i don’t know right so i think adjacent property to anywhere that the chickens could be open to makes sense um i also like the idea that we make this uh permitting process a little bit more accessible i don’t know what that means exactly but i had feedback from somebody in my ward that said they had every intention of going through the process but couldn’t find the form um whether that’s really truly um something that needs to be you know something we invest time into i’d just like to look at that um another thing that if we’re going to say set limits which i think we should and i don’t think that i’m i have any expertise to do that i think we’d have to defer a little bit i do think that there should be some sort of fine i mean if you have if you have chickens and you’re over the limit or you don’t have your permit is it uh you know 25 ticket that is something that just acknowledges that the rules were broken and then we can have some sort of paper trail even if it’s a dollar per chicken in excess of the permit just something to track so that we’re able to have some accountability um what i don’t like is that if if someone’s breaking the rules it’s just a phone call and then we hope that they abide by it so i would like to see things tightened up and i agree that we’d have to increase the limit by something all right do we have a motion from any council members or further comment i’ll just add one quick thing mr mayor i would agree i i do think that i i think i’ve heard it a couple times reasonable what is reasonable um and do i think four chickens five chickens would be reasonable six chickens sure what i don’t want to see is what may be reasonable to me may not be reasonable to mr gostad or mr sandy or whomever may have chickens in their backyard so i do think we have to settle on a number um and i’d agree with mr kovami that that we also have to if we have a permit process and that process isn’t being followed then there has to be consequences for that we do that with with every ordinance or city law that we have currently so i do think we need to refine that um and and have something in there with it and and who’s in charge of enforcing it and and have that outlined within the ordinance so that we’re not back here six months from now i’m talking about somebody having 20 chickens and we’re not quite sure what we’re going to do with that so i think that would be reasonable yep uh mr badard do you know i guess since you probably have the most historical knowledge how many chickens people traditionally have had i know you’ve had a small number of permits but uh mayor buchenski uh councilman mock we’ve had chickens in town under permit i think up to eight we’ve also had quail in town i don’t remember the number on that permit but they were in excess of what we would typically allow for chickens because they’re smaller birds and kept in confined in smaller cages so there is differences among foul as far as penalties i believe there is a fining penalty available um you know should we receive a complaint and they not comply i believe there are some penalties already in code [Music] any further questions for mr bernard why is up there yeah i’m sorry not for mr badard i would just add one thing i just took a quick look on limit on number of animals in the city of grand forks and effective august 18 2015 there’s a limit for cats and dogs and ground forks and households are limited to have a total of not more than six cats and dogs but no more than three of those can be dogs so we’re limiting cats and dogs in our city at six i i would assume that limiting chickens at six would be fair as well thank you mr arrival mr augusto do you have something to answer i do um i don’t mean to uh discourage the momentum that’s going on and and uh but there’s a lot of momentum uh coming at me at once and and to draft the agreement i’d like to have this come back not necessarily through a cow but at another city council meeting i think the cow is july 12th the 19th as a first reading of an ordinance that gives me an opportunity to work with mr bernard to come up with the the number in suggesting six it seems reasonable it seems like a good starting point anyways um because i had the same information about the number of chickens of six and quail double that or potentially 20 you know and i’d like to have the opportunity to sit down and draft this so that when we get together at a city council meeting as a first reading we’re moving the right direction rather than a number of uh conditions and before i’ve had the opportunity to speak to the public health and mr bradar as well if that sounds good no i think that’d be great at least tonight 4.3 on the the outright banning of chickens through that is died for lack of second so why we will move on and we’ll just have some follow up with you and mr bernard and you can bring something forward uh at that july 19th meeting we will do that mr cavani i just want to thank everyone that reached out when we do things it’s nice to get feedback so i think we were heard pretty loud and clear that there’s a lot of people that were not happy with that so i appreciate everyone’s efforts all right any further discussion on that moving on