By Maggie Lee / Staff

Like a chicken with its head cut off, the home poultry debate just won’t die.

First Roswell made the headlines with its very own “chicken man” saga that went on for months, then Johns Creek added to the fowl fiasco with a dispute of its own.

Now the state of Georgia wants to weigh-in with its own capon caper.

A new state House bill would allow the birds to live in a lot more places, and the proposal alone is making feathers fly in north Fulton. 

“Chickens are trendy.  They’re happenin’!” said Roswell Mayor Jere Wood, who keeps a hen and a rooster behind his law office on Canton Street.

But he’s got to find them a new address after a December city council vote to restrict chickens to residential property of at least one-third acre, with a cap of twelve hens per acre passed and a new city ordinance got on the books.

House Bill 842 could over-ride that, and restore a lot of roosts in the process. As drafted, it preempts all city and county ordinances that restrict home gardens and keeping chickens, rabbits and goats for personal consumption.

CHICKENS ARE PEOPLE, TOO

The bill’s author is Rep. Bobby Franklin (R-Marietta), known for his strict constitutionalism — he’s a lawmaker whom the Libertarian Party of Georgia considers a top legislative ally.

“This does not invalidate private covenants,” he pointed out, like the rules in some subdivisions. Nor does it allow commercial operations or leave animals completely ungoverned.

“If you’ve got odor, noise, your existing nuisance statute takes care of that.”

Franklin argues his bill isn’t the state overriding local control, it’s returning control to the most local unit: the family.

But Johns Creek Mayor Mike Bodker isn’t buying it.

“I guess under that premise, why do we have laws at all?”

He likes his city’s livestock ordinance because “it allows us to preempt rather than wait for nuisances to exist.”

Wood, who keeps heritage turkeys at home, disagrees. “Why should [state] government get involved with something in someone’s back yard that doesn’t bother anybody?

“The city can still govern a nuisance,” he said. “I think that’s what we should be doing.”

One of Bodker’s constituents, however, told the House panel that she’s frustrated and chapfallen with Johns Creek ordinances that she fought for six months.

“In November, I gave up,” said Martha Mellon of her twelve hens. “I relocated my chickens. Some went to live in Buckhead, in Atlanta, where they’re allowed. The rest of them went to live at Oakhurst Community Garden in Decatur where they are allowed.”

In fact, the Johns Creek nuisance code says backyard chickens must be kept 100 feet from any neighbor’s house, with which she complied because that’s the language she found when she searched the code.

But after finding what she thought was the sole chicken law, she stopped looking.  And she soon got a visit from city zoning enforcement with the news that any “agricultural building”— like a chicken coop – “has to be at least 200 feet from property lines.” 

Those 200 feet leave no spot on Mellon’s nearly one acre for any chicken shelter. Not even the doghouses she suggested to the city would work.

“A doghouse it becomes an agricultural building once a chicken steps into it,” she sighed.

Mellon could apply for a zoning variance, but on principle she declined.  “I didn’t want special consideration. I just wanted to do what I was lawfully allowed to do.”

MILTON: WE LOVE HORSES, NOT CHICKENS

The cities of Alpharetta and Milton stipulate that chickens must be kept at least 25 feet from neighboring houses.  But Milton mirrors Johns Creek zoning to keep “agricultural buildings” 200 feet from property lines. 

The Georgia Cooperative Extension Service recommends homeowners budget three to three and a half square feet of shelter for backyard flocks of hens.  That means an eight-by-ten coop could house 25 hens. 

But, “fencing is important for good neighborhood relations,” cautions Extension’s guide for keeping household hens. “Other people may not have the same appreciation for roaming livestock as you do, and this may cause social or legal problems.”

Indeed, the bill could stumble over city and county opposition. Not only does Bodker object, so does his Alpharetta counterpart, the Association of County Commissioners of Georgia and the Georgia Municipal Association.

“It’s just another one of those things,” said Alpharetta Mayor Arthur Letchas. “The state should be concentrating on more important things like education and water.

“Animals ought to be left to the cities,” he added. “Each city is different.”

Kelly Pridgen, counsel with ACCG, testified that “this law would die the hands of local governments to protect the other property owners in that residential district.”

LUSK LIKES CHICKENS — BUT CHAFES AT STATE INVOLVEMENT

Milton councilman Bill Lusk, a chicken owner himself, tends to agree. 

“I’m adverse to the state taking over responsibilities of local government.” His flock of three chickens includes Rooster Cogburn, named for John Wayne’s character in True Grit. 

The GMA, which counts 502 cities as members, takes the position that chickens are appropriately governed at the city level.

So said their lobbyist, Tom Gehl, a self-proclaimed “city boy”. But then he turned to a more elemental appeal:

A HALLOWEEN “JASON” SCENARIO?

“My grandmother told me about how she used to go to the butcher and she would select a chicken, it would have its neck [sic] chopped off and it would run around the yard with blood squirting out of its severed neck.”

Gehl got catcalled by the audience for his squeamishness, but he continued, “the potential of having goat slaughters in city back yards could potentially scar young childrens’ psyches as it did my poor grammie.”

But keeping chickens and other livestock evoked something elemental in the citizens too. 

Mellon wants to feed her sons fresh eggs.

Roswell’s famous Chicken Man, legally known as Andrew Wordes, opined, “The big farms are the problem.  People having farms at home, growing their own food is not a problem … it allows us to do something that’s economically sound, environmentally beneficial, and it dates back to biblical times.”

“When fish comes from Thailand, when our grapes come from Chile and Vidalia onions come as ‘sweet onions’ from Ecuador year round, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with us growing our own food, keeping our own chickens,” the Chicken Man concluded.

Wordes pulled the media spotlight onto Roswell last year when he sought permission to keep about 150 chickens on his one-acre lot.  Under the ordinance that will also oust Woods’ pullets, Wordes has to cut his bird-pets down to six by mid-March. He said he‘s down to about forty now. Some are tiny breeds weighing less than a pound, he explained.

GOATS LAY AN EGG

One of the very few metro businesses selling laying hens is Farmer D’s Organics, with stores in Atlanta and Norcross.  Darby Weaver at the Norcross branch predicts they will move about 100 chicks this spring at $9.95 each; her March pre-order is already half sold out. 

But goats might turn out to be a larger concern than chickens. 

“Goats have an odor,” said Agriculture Committee member Rep. Penny Houston (R-Nashville). 

 
Franklin compared a goat to a Great Dane, in terms of potential nuisance. 

One citizen groaned, “We need milk, too!” when Houston suggested writing goats out of the bill.

The bill passed a House agriculture subcommittee, unanimously, by the two members present.  But Rep. Buddy Harden (R-Cordele) cautioned he’d only support the bill in committee if it were redrafted to clarify that home livestock will be governed by local nuisance ordinances. 

“What I don’t want to do, seriously, is take away from our local governing authority, elected by our local people, the ability to do anything. If you satisfy that, I’m all right with it. But I’m afraid we did take it away,” with the original wording, said Harden, twice mayor of the city of Sylvester.

Franklin’s got a pair of co-signers on the bill: Rep. Tyrone Brooks (D-Atlanta) and Rep. Tom McCall (R-Elberton), chair of the Agricultural and Consumer Affairs Committee. 

“As long as we tighten up the language on nuisance, I think we’ve got a winner,” said Franklin after the subcommittee hearing. 

 Maybe, but he filed the original bill almost exactly a year before the first hearing. No date is set yet for a full committee hearing. 

But Wordes says he isn’t about to wait. “In December I said, ‘it ain’t over till the fat lady sings’ and I ain’t heard any music yet I also said ‘my pigs and chickens aren’t going anywhere,’ but I am starting to hear the music playing now, only it’s a sweet sounding country and western tune.”

To insure he’s part of the process, Wordes has just been approved by the Georgia State Department of Ethics as a registered lobbyist.

It appears that the “big chicken” has left the coop - for the Gold Dome, no less.