{"id":39958,"date":"2016-05-18T10:32:01","date_gmt":"2016-05-18T14:32:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/?p=39958"},"modified":"2016-05-18T10:32:01","modified_gmt":"2016-05-18T14:32:01","slug":"lehigh-acres-community-council-sets-up-working-committee-to-talk-about-chickens-in-lehigh-acres","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/2016\/05\/lehigh-acres-community-council-sets-up-working-committee-to-talk-about-chickens-in-lehigh-acres\/","title":{"rendered":"Lehigh Acres Community Council Sets Up Working Committee To Talk About Chickens In Lehigh Acres"},"content":{"rendered":"

Listen to the meeting click here<\/a><\/p>\n

\"\"A few dozen residents of\u00a0Lehigh Acres\u00a0have\u00a0vowed to press on with a movement to legalize backyard chickens in their unincorporated part of Lee County.<\/p>\n

The Lehigh Community Council voted Monday night\u00a0to set up a working committee to develop an outline for an ordinance to legalize chicken-keeping.<\/p>\n

The committee was created after more than three dozen residents showed up at the regular Lehigh\u00a0Community Council meeting to stand up for the right to keep hens in one’s backyard, in a discussion council\u00a0chair Rick Anglickis called “the weirdest agenda item I’ve seen.”<\/p>\n

But residents who favor chickens were passionate about it, endorsing backyard chickens on nutritional, educational, financial, philosophical and cultural grounds.<\/p>\n

“I came here because I didn’t want to live in a HOA (homeowner\u2019s\u00a0association) community, you come out here because you want people to leave you alone,” said resident Teresa Park.\u00a0\u00a0“I have a half acre; I’ve never owned chickens because I’ve watched my friends get busted.”<\/p>\n

Resident Chuck Edwards, whose presentation to Lee County commissioners a couple of weeks ago set off the current clamor for the right to own hens,\u00a0said he also moved to a rural location to “live the way I wanted to.”<\/p>\n

For Edwards, that means with a collection of egg-laying hens in the backyard.<\/p>\n

“This should be a non-issue, there’s 15,000 cities in the United States that allow backyard chickens.” Edwards said. “This little section of Lehigh Acres … we pay our taxes like everyone else, we should be allowed to do what we want on our own property.”<\/p>\n

Frank Mann, chairman of the board of county commissioners, warned the residents they face a tough road in getting a chicken law passed for Lehigh.<\/p>\n

He told\u00a0the residents that lawyers have told him that any ordinance would have to apply to the entire county.<\/p>\n

“That doesn’t mean that it’s impossible to do,” Mann said. “If you can get a groundswell here that really demonstrates strong community support, and you’re a community of 85,000 to 100,000 people, that would be a jumping-off point to approach the county commissioners.”<\/p>\n

Left unclear was whether the grassroots\u00a0benevolence toward chickens in Lehigh could be expressed by changing zoning rules to allow chickens in designated areas under specified conditions.<\/p>\n

The five-member panel created by the Lehigh Community Council will take a month to develop what Mann referred to as “bullet points” to form the framework of a request for county action.<\/p>\n

“You’re in the right place to make your case,” Mann said. “It’s not going to happen automatically; this is a very good start.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Listen to the meeting click here A few dozen residents of\u00a0Lehigh Acres\u00a0have\u00a0vowed to press on with a movement to legalize backyard chickens in their unincorporated part of Lee County. The… <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":30053,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[57,32],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39958"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=39958"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39958\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/30053"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=39958"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=39958"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=39958"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}