City's chicken ban prevails

Owner gives up birds to fight law

SANFORD -- Alex Reid is giving up her city chickens, but she has no plans to surrender in her fight to get City Council members to reconsider Sanford's anti-poultry ordinance.

Reid's request to keep her chickens was turned down Tuesday night by the city's Housing Board of Appeals. Anticipating the outcome, Reid brought the chickens with her and left them in the parking lot during the meeting. Afterward, she handed them over to a friend who lives less than two miles outside the city limits and has a flock of his own. They made the move at night because chickens are calmer then, Reid said.

Reid has been trying to persuade city leaders to lift the ban on backyard birds since an inspector spotted her coop this spring and mailed her a citation, threatening her with a fine of $100 a bird a day. That's $1,400 a day for Reid's flock.

Reid and her family have raised a variety of rare, mail-order chickens over the past several years, and her son and daughter have won ribbons at the Lee County and N.C. State fairs. They were unaware it was illegal to keep chickens in Sanford until they were cited.

Since then, Reid has twice gone before the City Council to make her case, arguing that cities across North Carolina and the nation allow the keeping of chickens as long as they don't create a nuisance or health hazard. Some regulate the size of the flock, the manner in which the coops must be kept or the size of the property on which they are allowed. Many prohibit the keeping of roosters.

Urban flocks have become chic. Those who keep coops say that the birds are excellent pets, the eggs are fresher and more healthful than those available in grocery stores and that they are a great way to teach children responsibility and a connection to the food chain.

Reid has said she is willing to comply with whatever restrictions Sanford's leaders might establish -- except for the all-out ban that has been in place for years.

The city's lead inspector and a council member have said part of the reason they don't want to loosen the ordinance is because of Sanford's growing number of Hispanic residents, who they fear would want to raise chickens and other livestock.

City Council member Joe Martin said Tuesday he thinks the board ought to at least discuss the matter. It seemed to him, he said, that there might be a way to allow chickens under certain circumstances.

"Why not look at it?" said Martin, a 15-year veteran of the board. "If you constitute an ordinance, and it says you've got to have this and you've got to do that, then not everybody's going to be able to have chickens. Some of my colleagues have said, 'How are you going to police that?' My answer is, the same way you police everything else. You get a complaint, you go out. But you don't have to have somebody in a car going around looking for chickens."

Reid, who has years of marketing and advertising experience, is preparing her next mailing for the council members, which includes media coverage of a demonstration she led in front of city hall carrying egg-shaped protest signs. She also will send copies of letters to the editor of the Sanford Herald in support of her cause and results of an online poll in which 79 percent of respondents favored allowing chicken coops inside city limits.

"This one little issue -- a chicken ordinance -- has really exposed a lot of things in this community that need to be addressed," Reid said.