That’s how many chickens a Naperville resident may legally keep after the City Council voted 6 to 3 Tuesday to amend the city’s fowl and livestock code.
Councilmen Grant Wehrli, Doug Krause and Kenn Miller voted against the measure.
David Laird’s chicken coop sparked the controversy when some of his neighbors complained about the fowl living next door and asked the City Council for a total ban on chickens within city limits.
“I knew that there was going to be a compromise,” Laird said after the vote, “or there was going to be nothing.”
With 12 birds currently in his coop, Laird will have to find homes for four of them, although it’s unclear how much time the city will allow him to get down to the legal limit.
“I’ll do everything in my power to comply with the rules and ordinances of Naperville,” he said. “I’ll find homes for them somewhere.”
In addition to the first-time ever limit on fowl within city limits, the changes to the ordinance call for keeping a chicken coop at least 30 feet away from a neighbor’s house, mandates sweeping the coop every 24 hours and screening open coops for at least the bottom 6 feet.
Roosters are now banned completely.
Ronald Barghesi, one of the neighbors who originally complained to the city, was in attendance but waived his right to speak.
Laird had his supporters. Laura Kemner lives in unincorporated Naperville and spoke of how her husband decided 10 years ago that he wanted to raise chickens.
Being a suburban girl, as she put it, the news came as a bit of a shock.
“My preconceived notions proved to be wrong,” she said. “It’s not what I expected.”
Kemner said she felt the controversy was less about chickens and more about people’s expectations of their neighbors.
“We expect that our neighbors are going to conduct themselves in a certain way,” she told the council, noting that some of that conduct was “not always to our liking.”
She said that while people often didn’t conform to expectations, it was diversity that makes a neighborhood interesting.
Kemner’s daughter Ellery told the City Council that she’d been raising chickens for virtually her entire life.
“I’ve had 10 amazing years with them,” she said, noting that she’d showen them in the DuPage County Fair and at her 4H Club.
Moreover, she produced 75 signatures from her school supporting her position that the ordinance should be left the way i.
Laird thanked the City Council members for their attention, but later said that his children would be disappointed.
“They think it’s a drag,” he said. “They’ve gotten attached to them.”
2012年2月9日星期四
2011年4月17日星期日
Sun-Kissed Goodness
Picking strawberries was at the top of our “fun” list this weekend. Friday marked the season opening at Hall Family Farm in Ballantyne. My 5 and 6-year-olds couldn’t wait to get there and were “yahoo-ing” in the car when they saw signs that it was (finally!) open.
The fun doesn’t stop at picking your own delicious, ripe and ready sun-kissed strawberries. In fact, that’s just the beginning. We started out our little adventure by checking out the new colorful chicken coop that houses the birds that are pegged for farm-fresh egg production later this summer. Next, the kids ran over to the water pump duck-races. Yikes - watch those fingers! From there, they raced through the “maze” set up with posts and string. It was fun for them to run around for a few minutes, but they gave up pretty quickly and ducked between the ropes to get out.
I was eventually able to convince them that we should get going if we wanted to get our hands on some of those strawberries. The Hall Farm is luckier than some of the others to the south – their damage from the recent hail storms was relatively minor. We grabbed a cardboard basket and picked a row that looked good. We made it about halfway down the row before we had several pounds of juicy red strawberries.
We cooled off with a strawberry smoothie and waited for the “Sing-a-Long” hayride to start, a downright adorable addition to the farm’s fun activities. Farmer Kevin Hall put an ancient tractor to work, pulling kids around in a wagon while a recording (narrated by their daughter) gave a little tour in between classics like “Old MacDonald.”
If I have one regret, it was that I left my 16-month old behind. He would have loved the hay ride and I would have loved a picture of him on the farm. I can’t wait to go back to grab more strawberries and a great family photo!
The fun doesn’t stop at picking your own delicious, ripe and ready sun-kissed strawberries. In fact, that’s just the beginning. We started out our little adventure by checking out the new colorful chicken coop that houses the birds that are pegged for farm-fresh egg production later this summer. Next, the kids ran over to the water pump duck-races. Yikes - watch those fingers! From there, they raced through the “maze” set up with posts and string. It was fun for them to run around for a few minutes, but they gave up pretty quickly and ducked between the ropes to get out.
I was eventually able to convince them that we should get going if we wanted to get our hands on some of those strawberries. The Hall Farm is luckier than some of the others to the south – their damage from the recent hail storms was relatively minor. We grabbed a cardboard basket and picked a row that looked good. We made it about halfway down the row before we had several pounds of juicy red strawberries.
We cooled off with a strawberry smoothie and waited for the “Sing-a-Long” hayride to start, a downright adorable addition to the farm’s fun activities. Farmer Kevin Hall put an ancient tractor to work, pulling kids around in a wagon while a recording (narrated by their daughter) gave a little tour in between classics like “Old MacDonald.”
If I have one regret, it was that I left my 16-month old behind. He would have loved the hay ride and I would have loved a picture of him on the farm. I can’t wait to go back to grab more strawberries and a great family photo!
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