SUNDRE – Town council has officially approved a conditional one-year pilot program that will provide a limited number of interested residents with an opportunity to try raising backyard hens within the municipality’s boundaries.
The bylaw had received first reading during the Dec. 4 meeting when council at the time went on to table the item pending a request to amend the proposed rules to remove a requirement for pilot program participants to obtain adjacent residents’ consent.
Following council’s direction, administration revised the proposed bylaw and brought the updated document back for a final decision during the regular Dec. 18 meeting.
Instead of requiring those who want to participate in the pilot program to obtain permission from their immediate neighbours, the municipality will send written notification to adjacent landowners who could be impacted, said Linda Nelson, chief administrative officer.
“This is a letter that the Town of Sundre would send out to adjacent landowners – anybody affected within a certain area of where the proposed chickens would be placed – so that we can make sure that anyone affected by the bylaw has an opportunity to come forward to council and appeal the decision,” said Nelson.
And for the purposes of the pilot project, she also pointed out that there will be a limited number of people who can participate in the one-year trial.
“We’re only going to approve five locations,” she said.
Additional restrictions outlined in the bylaw include a requirement to keep the hens contained in a design-specific coop, obtaining a Premises Identification Number under the Animal Health Act as well as the Canadian Food Inspection Agency, a ban on roosters, as well as a minimum of two hens and a maximum of four.
Should the pilot program not end up being adopted and fully implemented as a permanent bylaw after the project wraps up in January 2025, participants will have 90 days from the end of the trial to make arrangement to relocate the hens.
“I think we’ve talked about it a lot and I think it’s something that we should go ahead and do,” said Coun. Connie Anderson, who moved second reading.
Coun. Owen Petersen, an enthusiastic proponent of backyard hens dating back many years even prior to being elected to town council, wanted to make clear to his colleagues and the public his intentions about advocating for what he considers to be an important issue.
The subject of chickens – the butt of no shortage of jokes – might elicit some chuckles and a flock of opportunities for puns, but the councillor in this instance was not in a laughing mood.
“Chickens can get pretty goofy, and you can talk about them in very fun, happy, jovial way,” said Petersen.
“But to me, chickens actually are an issue of food security and community resilience,” he said.
That perspective, he asserted, has been made evident by the growing trend of urban centres increasingly introducing their own regulations to accommodate backyard hens in response to organized homegrown movements over the past 10 years or so.
These decisions, he added, were not made or imposed on a random whim by elected municipal councils.
“It was a grassroots movement that has gone through a lot of urban areas,” he said, adding there’s a reason why that interest was rekindled.
“The history of chickens is long. Their scientific name is Gallus Domesticus; they are domesticated. They were domesticated thousands of years ago to live alongside humans,” he said.
“Right now, we have banished them from the urban landscape to big factory farms where thousands of them under one roof live in little cubicles like God intended,” he said, drawing some laughter.
But it doesn’t have to be that way.
“It’s important to bring chickens back into urban landscapes to connect people with their food and to get all the residual benefits from them,” he said.
“Chickens eat our food waste and produce food at same time. There’s an incredible cycle there that we lose in an urban environment that children don’t grow up seeing because we just assume that we can go to the grocery store and get our boneless, skinless chicken breasts every day that we want,” he said.
“I think this is a really, really big issue. This is one more step towards having a more food-secure community, and having more resiliency in our community.”
And the pilot program is just a small sampling as there will be a maximum of five participants.
“It’s a drop in the bucket. But it’s one step – one piece of the puzzle – to having a more resilient community,” he said.
Coun. Jaime Marr said that prior to being elected to council, she wasn’t necessarily supportive of backyard hens in town.
“However, I think a pilot project is appropriate,” said Marr, adding the bylaw outlines plenty of rules and that the program is worth a shot.
Coun. Paul Isaac asked administration how the municipality would monitor and assess the pilot.
“We’ll have to depend on the community for this one; particularly the people who are living in close proximity,” said Nelson. “I think we would have to monitor it by the number of concerns. But they have to be valid concerns, not frivolous concerns.”
Administration will also include updates in the departmental reports presented to council every second meeting of each month, she said.
“What we’ll do is report on the number of applications that we’ve had and any concerns that come forward,” she said.
Speaking opposed to the motion, mayor Richard Warnock expressed concerns about the potential of inadvertently luring more predators into town. Unlike larger urban centres that have allowed urban hens, Sundre is situated in a natural interface surrounded by wildlife habitat, he said.
“That’s the thing that bothers me,” he said about concerns regarding predators.
“And maybe the pilot project will identify that that’s a false suspicion; I don’t know that. But it might also identify it as a hazard for our town.”
The mayor called a vote on the motion, which carried with him and Coun. Chris Vardas opposed.
As a point of order, Nelson reminded council unanimous consent is required only when all three readings of a bylaw are being carried in one sitting, whereas first reading in this instance had been passed at the last meeting.
Coun. Todd Dalke motioned to give the bylaw third and final reading, which again passed with Warnock and Vardas opposed.
The trial program has an established timeline of January 2024 to January 2025.
