It was chicken versus bear at city hall this week.
On Tuesday (May 6), the District of Squamish conducted a public hearing on an omnibus bill that updates more than 80 zoning bylaws. It examines everything from driveway lengths and the use of shipping containers to indoor food production.
But everyone at the meeting wanted to talk about one thing — chickens.
The amendments include a proposed definition of urban agriculture that allows residents to keep “poultry, fowl or bees.” It also enables people to set up neighbourhood retail stands to sell goods produced in their backyards.
The backyard chicken debate has ruffled officials’ feathers for the past four years. While urban agriculture has hit major cities across North America — Vancouver, New York, Boston — Squamish is faced with the additional challenge of managing wildlife attractants.
Squamish Climate Action Network (CAN) started the community’s urban agriculture conversation in 2010, said Carolyn Morris, Squamish’s farmers’ market manager and Squamish CAN member. In the early days, the group collected 317 signatures from people in favour of backyard chicken coops. Allowing the birds into residential neighbourhoods goes beyond education and nutritional reasoning, Morris said.
“Food security is quite a challenge in this district,” Morris warned.
Squamish resident Mike Dobbin grew up on a farm. His father was an inspector for chickens, which is onereason he wants to raise his own rather than eating store-bought eggs, Dobbin said.
Large chicken operations stink, but a few chickens in one’s backyard will smell far less than people’s garbage totes that they place curbside, he said.
Squamish resident Dave Colwell disagreed. No matter how one boils the egg, chickens and their food attract wildlife, he warned. If Squamish residents want to keep chickens they should back district staff’s idea of creating a controlled chicken run cared for by a community co-op, Colwell said.
“I think that it would be an asset to the town,” he noted.
Conservation and bylaw resources are already stretched thin, Colwell said. The regulations needed to ensure that urban chicken coops don’t attract rodents and larger animals will be unenforceable, he said.
The decision comes down to freedom of choice, Squamish resident Auli Parviainen said. Just as with cats and dogs, there will be regulations to guide how chickens are kept, which in turn would minimize wildlife attractants, she noted. And just as with the current regulations, there will be some failures, Parviainen said, adding residents will be responsible for mitigating them.
“I would really ask the council to carefully consider what type of town they are going to set for the community,” she said.
As the zoning bylaw stands, there are no regulations on how many chickens people can keep and what qualifies as fowl or poultry, Coun. Ron Sander said, noting technically people could have ostriches or geese in their yards. He asked district staff whether there is any way to fix the wording to specify hens.
The zoning deals with land use only, said Robin Arthurs, the district’s general manager of corporate services. Once adopted, municipal staff would have to return to council with a set of regulations governing backyard chickens.
The omnibus bylaw is anticipated to return to council for third reading on May 20.
