Sorry the blog has been so epically dead in the last few days and weeks. I’ve just been really busy. But hey, here’s some news! Thanks to the tireless efforts of Becky’s friend Sundari at Sustainable Food Denver, our trio of chickens now has a path to citizenship!
Monday night, the Denver City Council passed a proposal that will allow residents to have up to six food-producing animals on their property.
More specifically, the permitting process for chickens, ducks and goats is vastly simplified and streamlined, and the expense is reduced to a one-time $20 fee for up to sixanimals, as opposed to $150 and a confusing, multi-agency permitting process that many chicken owners just ignored altogether (or, *cough*, ahem, so I’ve heard).
Becky is happy. So is Sundari. Flora, Fauna, Merryweather and Little Chicken Foo-Foo are happy too, though that may have more to do with the banana peels I tossed into their run this morning.
Michelle Malkin, meanwhile, could not be reached for comment on this chicken shamnesty. 🙂
UPDATE: More on the chicken vote from the Denver Post…
By a vote of 7-3, the Denver City Council on Monday approved an ordinance change that eases restrictions and eliminates some of the paperwork now faced by would-be urban homesteaders.
Denver residents can already legally keep chickens, ducks and goats. The vote Monday changes the permitting process and makes it easier — and cheaper — to own the animals.
Currently, Denver residents have to complete a permit process that requires them to notify their neighbors of their intention to own the animals and to pay a one-time, $100 permit fee and $50 a year for chickens and $100 a year for livestock, such as goats.
Monday’s vote means that after the ordinance change takes effect, residents will pay only a one-time $20 license fee.
The license will allow them to keep up to eight chickens or ducks — but not roosters or drakes — and up to two dwarf goats without having to get a zoning permit or notify the public.
…and more from Sundari:
We need to say “thank you.”
We know that there was overwhelming support in the community for FPAs [Food Producing Animals], a tremendous turnout at the public hearing, and considerable precedent for the ordinance set by other cities. Happily, City Council listened to all of this, and so the public process went the way that it’s supposed to. However, in passing the ordinance, City Council did have to stand up to the NIMBY folks, and established neighborhood groups who opposed the changes.
Let’s take a moment to express our gratitude to the members of City Council who voted for the ordinance, and so eloquently shared their reasons for doing so during last night’s Council meeting.
P.S. By the way, in case anyone’s sarcasm meter is malfunctioning, I just want to explicitly point out that I’m happy about this development, I think the City Council made the right call, and I’m totally just being silly with the “shamnesty” stuff.
I know this was a light-hearted post, but it is such a good example of government overreach, I can’t resist.
Take a (fair I think) paraphrase of a line from your post;
More specifically, the permitting process for X is vastly simplified and streamlined, and the expense is reduced to a one-time $20 fee for up to six Y, as opposed to $150 and a confusing, multi-agency permitting process that many Z just ignored altogether ;
and you have produced an almost perfect description of the average citizen’s interaction with government over the last fifty years, along with the solution that we on the right have been advocating all along. Government works this way at every level.
Try harder to resist, gahrie. Brendan has spent the last two weeks with his sleeves rolled up furiously pouring through Sarah Palin’s emails for the NYTimes with nothing to show for it, and he deserves more upon his return than your ideological jibber jabber.
Heh!
By the way, I agree with you, gahrie. One of the great flaws of modern liberalism is its over-reliance on regulation and failure to recognize and address the problems caused by over-regulation and poorly designed regulations. George F. Will speaks the truth when he talks about the Left’s ill-begotten love affair with the administrative state.
Of course, one of the great flaws of modern conservatism is its over-reliance on market forces (the point of near religious faith in the infallibility thereof) and its tendency to demonize all (or nearly all) regulation, failing to recognize in many instances that reasonable regulation is necessary, and what’s needed is smarter, leaner regulation, not a rigid ideological anti-regulation philosophy based on out-of-context Reagan sound bites (“government is not the solution to our problems, government is the problem,” etc.).
In other words, I believe both ideologies are wrong about this. Hence my being a centrist and a case-by-case pragmatist. 🙂
But anyway, I agree with you that the old law was a classic example of poorly designed regulation that needed to be fixed, and this change is a great example of well-designed, logical regulatory reform (pragmatism FTW!). Of course, in this case, the change was pushed by folks who would normally be caricatured as liberal hippies — Denverites who keep farm animals in the back yard, and who probably drive Priuses whose only emission is a smug cloud (kidding, Sundari!) — which just goes to show that people often tend to advocate excessive regulation of things they don’t understand, and only recognize the problems bad regulations cause when those regulations impact their lives directly. Kind of like how people tend to advocate spending cuts in the abstract, but almost never when the cuts would specifically impact their lives…
P.S. If you wonder what I’ve really been doing the last two weeks…. well, a lot of things, but one small thing was posting an anti-Obama rant on Twitter (here, here, here and here) that you two might find interesting:
I realize this is easy to mock, so let me clarify. I’m not totally naive; I never worshipped Obama; I always understood that he was a pragmatist, that he was a politician and not a saint, that he’d break some promises (all politicians do). Indeed, I counted on the fact that he wouldn’t govern as a rigid ideologue, but rather, would exercise good judgment in addressing facts on the ground, even if it meant pissing off his “base” now and then. So when I say “he suckered us,” I’m not comparing him to some ridiculous netroots vision of the perfect left-wing president and halo-wearing transformational leader who would slow the oceans’ rise, heal the planet, etc.
That said, I really thought he had a different vision of executive power than his predecessors. I didn’t expect transformational change, but I expected incremental steps in the right direction. Instead, given a wide-open field with multiple viable options, he chooses the most Cheney-esque option available. That’s a complete betrayal of even a reasonable, non-head-in-the-clouds notion of what Candidate Obama supposedly stood for.
“Faced with an array of legal opinions, Obama picked the one with a highly aggressive, expansive vision of executive power. …Instead, given a wide-open field with multiple viable options, he chooses the most Cheney-esque option available.”
I don’t see how a smart lawyer like yourself could possibly make that claim. The most “aggressive, expansive vision of executive power” on this subject — indeed, the Cheney view — is that the War Powers Act is unconstitutional and therefore the president is not bound by it; Congress’ veto power lies in its control of the purse. The legal fiction that Obama chose to adopt, in contrast, does nothing to buttress the long-term “vision of executive power” as advocated by most of his predecessors right back to when the War Powers Act was passed. Instead, he posits a game of semantics about what actually constitutes “hostilities” and therefore congressional approval is not required. This forces Congress to either A) invoke a ruling from a federal judge (right on up to SCOTUS if necessary), who will likely punt back to the legislature; B) de-fund the “not hostilities” military action in question; or C) pass a binding resolution declaring the president to be in violation of the War Powers Act and demanding he shut it down. This less aggressive stance on the part of the Executive invites a far more tumultuous constitutional showdown between the two branches than necessary. Bottom line: Obama should either have gone to Congress for authorization or stuck with the Cheney position.
Our home town, Normal, IL just show down this proposal for people to have chicken coops.
AMLTrojan #6 – Brendan isn’t being a smart lawyer when he posts his comments #4 and #5 …
“Cheney-esque” is a simple emotional attempt to characterise something in a negative way without giving any thought to the realisation that replacing it with “Biden-esque” makes the characterisation risible … the Vice-President just doesn’t have the power …
He is even less of a smart lawyer when he offers opposing counsel the timeless phrase “That’s a complete betrayal of even a reasonable, non-head-in-the-clouds notion of what Candidate Obama supposedly stood for.” {m emphasis} … it invites an immediate response of ““supposedly stood for” – “supposed” by *whom*, we ask ? Not by those who learn from history ! Not by those who have to balance their own budget, their own cheque-book ! Not by those who know and respect the good that the US has done throughout the years !” … with all due respect, Counselor Loy, your Candidate Obama fast foot shuffled for many things, but doesn’t seem to have stood for *anything* except when convenient, and even then, only as long as was convenient !