Council sets limit on neighborhood chickens

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Tim Rossow handles his chickens in the back yard of his home on Sunday in Naperville. Terence Guider-Shaw~For Sun-Times Media

Updated: March 11, 2012 8:36AM

Eight is enough.

That’s how many chickens a Naperville resident may legally keep after the City Council voted 6 to 3 Tuesday to amend the city’s fowl and livestock code.

Councilmen Grant Wehrli, Doug Krause and Kenn Miller voted against the measure.

David Laird’s chicken coop sparked the controversy when some of his neighbors complained about the fowl living next door and asked the City Council for a total ban on chickens within city limits.

“I knew that there was going to be a compromise,” Laird said after the vote, “or there was going to be nothing.”

With 12 birds currently in his coop, Laird will have to find homes for four of them, although it’s unclear how much time the city will allow him to get down to the legal limit.

“I’ll do everything in my power to comply with the rules and ordinances of Naperville,” he said. “I’ll find homes for them somewhere.”

In addition to the first-time ever limit on fowl within city limits, the changes to the ordinance call for keeping a chicken coop at least 30 feet away from a neighbor’s house, mandates sweeping the coop every 24 hours and screening open coops for at least the bottom 6 feet.

Roosters are now banned completely.

Ronald Barghesi, one of the neighbors who originally complained to the city, was in attendance but waived his right to speak.

Laird had his supporters. Laura Kemner lives in unincorporated Naperville and spoke of how her husband decided 10 years ago that he wanted to raise chickens.

Being a suburban girl, as she put it, the news came as a bit of a shock.

“My preconceived notions proved to be wrong,” she said. “It’s not what I expected.”

Kemner said she felt the controversy was less about chickens and more about people’s expectations of their neighbors.

“We expect that our neighbors are going to conduct themselves in a certain way,” she told the council, noting that some of that conduct was “not always to our liking.”

She said that while people often didn’t conform to expectations, it was diversity that makes a neighborhood interesting.

Kemner’s daughter Ellery told the City Council that she’d been raising chickens for virtually her entire life.

“I’ve had 10 amazing years with them,” she said, noting that she’d showen them in the DuPage County Fair and at her 4H Club.

Moreover, she produced 75 signatures from her school supporting her position that the ordinance should be left the way i.

Laird thanked the City Council members for their attention, but later said that his children would be disappointed.

“They think it’s a drag,” he said. “They’ve gotten attached to them.”