This is a multi-post series about my steps to getting chickens. If you’d like to read the previous post, you can read it here.
To catch you up or remind you, depending on where you are reading this post, you have reached out to the city council and the mayor through email. You’ve also met with council members and the mayor. You’ve gathered information regarding their concerns. Now you research.
There’s several things you should research. I recommend researching the concerns brought to you. You want to find information to counter the concerns. For example, if one of the concern is related to noise. Search for the decimal of noise a chicken makes AND ways to to improve noise. One way, don’t allow roosters which are the louder than hens. Also, look at other local communities and see how they address the concern.
This will likely take a lot of work to gather the research. As the saying goes, many hands make light work, recruiting the work-group to help with this process. I would set up meetings every two weeks to discuss the research and begin combining the data. It may take a couple of months before you are ready to move onto the next step. Its really important you take your time and gather and document research in an organized way. This will save you time later.
The next step my group did, was we took that research and combined it into an email for the mayor and council requesting to have chickens within the city limits. Our group also drafted an ordinance to provide as a reference. This wouldn’t be necessary. In fact, the council looked at it initially but did not base their ordinance off our draft. So I’m not certain how necessary it was, except to show we’d done our work. We did pick one main communicator with the board and mayor. She emailed the information. After emailing our request for the council to consider chickens which included our research and the draft ordinance, we mobilized the Facebook group to send emails in support of the chicken ordinance.
And, much to our pleasure, after we had enough emails, we were notified chickens were on the agenda! We were stoked.
Tales of the Working Mom 