Prior Lake holds off on urban chicken-keeping

People living in the city of Prior Lake won't be able to keep chickens anytime soon — unless they can show the City Council that they really, really want to.

After considering a city code amendment May 26 that would allow urban chicken-keeping, the City Council decided not to take action unless it hears directly from interested residents.

"I'm not feeling a strong desire or need to change an ordinance when I don't have somebody sitting in front of me giving me a cause or a reason or the rationale by which I should," said Council Member Monique Morton.

Prior Lake allows chickens only on agricultural lots larger than 2 acres.

Several of the city's south metro neighbors have modified their ordinances to allow chicken-keeping in urban areas. In Savage, the City Council amended a farm animal ordinance last summer to allow for up to four hens — and no roosters — on urban parcels.

"The genesis of it was that we had some residents that were either interested in it or had in fact already been doing it, and just were kind of flying under the radar," said Planning Manager Bryan Tucker.

Tucker said he knows of about a half-dozen households keeping chickens in Savage, and hasn't heard any complaints.

"This sort of an ordinance is a lifestyle choice issue," said City Administrator Frank Boyles, "and there is the potential for conflict to take place."

Similarly, in Eden Prairie, the City Council has heard from a few residents interested in urban chicken-keeping, but not enough to merit an ordinance change, said City Manager Rick Getschow.

"I'm not saying that it would not happen in the future — and we are seeing that many other cities are allowing back-yard chickens," he said. "But as of right now, that's not something that we're pursuing."

Thomas Kriese started keeping and blogging about chickens in California in 2007, and said he hears from people around the country who want to raise chickens but live in cities that don't allow it. The most common concerns that opponents raise, he said, are noise — which isn't an issue with the hens that cities typically allow — and smell.

"Everybody has driven past a huge industrial chicken coop in the summer with the windows down and regretted it for the next 60 miles," he said. "That's what they think that it's going to smell like in people's back yards."

The biggest surge came about two months ago, he said, after a community education class on back yard chicken-keeping. The class, offered by the Shakopee Mdewakanton Sioux Community's Wozupi farm, lasted just one evening but brought in between 20 and 25 calls.

At the same time, there's been a lot more interest in the class itself. Angelica Adams, Wozupi's program coordinator, said this year's class had 15 participants, compared to just three last year.

"It's something that people are becoming more and more interested in," she said. "Most of us that work here live in Minneapolis … and so I think we kind of brought that momentum from the city out here."

In his research on chicken-keeping, Kriese said, he's found that the birds were once a much more common sight in urban yards. The change, he said, "seemed to be in the '50s, when the status symbol of prosperity was a big green lawn and not farms or farm animals in a large dusty lot."

For cities that prohibit urban chicken-keeping, though, the big, green lawns seem to have held fast.