The Great Urban Chicken Debate is over. Pet fowl is a foul ball in town, out of bounds – officially outlawed.
And while this controversial issue is done the town finds itself immediately embroiled in another testy discussion, this one over the credibility of its once embraced public engagement policy.
With great exuberance town council, with Mayor Jim Romane leading the cheers, sought the public’s input last summer on the pet chicken issue through a well-prepared month-long online and print survey. The result was overwhelmingly in favour to legalize pet chickens.
That was not good enough for five councillors, some of them passionately preferring to rely on hearsay one-sided opinions collected off the streets. There were even allegations that pro-chicken support came from citizens sending in multiple and fraudulent survey responses to ensure victory.
“Because we do talk to people in the community as well as looking at any kind of public poll that could be skewed to people that may answer the questions more than once,” rationalized Coun. Glen Carritt, council’s leading anti-chicken advocate.
However, the problem with Carritt’s suspicion is that town staff has confirmed it was highly unlikely such attempted trickery was successful as there was a system in place to limit responses to one per device, with fraudulent responses easily detected. In other words, town staff did their job well to ensure the vote was fair and accurate.
Nevertheless, council’s own vote is now final, and there is one fine public relations mess to deal with. Just check out the anger on social media responses.
A substantial part of the community is feeling betrayed because this council was elected largely on the promise it would do things differently, that their opinions mattered, that elected officials would listen.
Five councillors chose a new questionable agenda, and unless something dramatically changes with the current public engagement policy, many of the aggrieved citizenry will mobilize to give elected officials the boot at election time, with the exceptions being councillors Doug Bos and Jean Barclay who correctly embraced the survey result.
And what changes can be done? This interesting problem could find its way to the plate of town CAO Todd Becker, a really smart guy who has assembled a fine senior management team since his arrival to town. If council wants to proceed with an improved public engagement policy designed by Becker’s staff to reflect public input they ought to listen.
That, folks, would be a great start. Start, you say? Yup. Because they sure are not doing so now.
Johnnie Bachusky is the editor of the Innisfail Province.
