Cloquet considers letting chickens come to roost

Talk about it

When Cloquet Planning Commission member Julie Kainu told the half-dozen people gathered in the library meeting room that Tuesday’s meeting was more about gathering ideas and “getting their Ts crossed,” local chicken activist Diane Lambert couldn’t resist.

“Don’t you mean ‘all our ducks in a row?’” she asked, grinning. “Although I guess we’re not talking ducks here.”

Indeed. The only poultry on Tuesday’s informal agenda was chickens, specifically chickens raised for laying eggs – rather than for slaughter – and no roosters because of the noise.

Girls only in the coop.

Coincidentally, it was women only at Tuesday’s meeting, which was the first committee meeting held since Lambert approached both the Cloquet City Council and the Planning Commission about changing the city ordinance forbidding farm animals on residential lots less than 10 acres in size.

Lambert, who raised chickens growing up on a hobby farm near Esko, has been researching how other Minnesota cities handled the growing demand for chickens inside city limits. Other Minnesota cities that have passed so-called “chicken ordinances” include Duluth, Brainerd, Maplewood, Rochester, Burnsville, Minneapolis and St. Paul, among others.

Why would city residents want to raise chickens?

Lambert said it shouldn’t be to save money on eggs, because the expenses normally outweigh the savings. Nor could eggs be sold legally, because they would not be pasteurized.

Kainu said she would like to see a “Chickens 101” class offered every spring, something Lambert and Spears said they would be willing to help teach. One way to attract students would be to offer $5 off the city license fee for people who had completed the class.

Raising a small number of chickens for eggs is a growing trend in urban areas of the United States.

Of the cities that allow chickens, Lambert said Duluth has the most licensed coops, about 30. The licensing fee in Duluth is among the lowest, at $10. Maplewood was the highest, at $75 for the first year.

Kainu said she thought between $20 and $30 seemed like a fair price for licensing in Cloquet, because a coop would have to be inspected to make sure it met code requirements, plus the city would also have to pay for any other code enforcement efforts – which brought the group to probably the biggest problem with changing city code: the fact that Cloquet doesn’t have its own animal control officer. Instead, the city contracts with the Friends of Animals Humane Society for animal control services.

Other possible issues were waste management – chicken poop can be bagged and thrown away or composted (if done properly) – and vermin can be attracted to unsecured coops or loose food.

All of those concerns could be addressed in the city code, Kainu said. Rather than starting from scratch, the group decided to base most of the proposed Cloquet code changes on Duluth’s.

Some of the potential rules for chickens included the following: