Board of Aldermen 12-11-2018 Page 37
Alderman O’Brien
Thank you Madam President, | can support the previous amendment and | would like to advise my
fellow Alderman Tencza, if | may suggest, I’m not against to the whole board if they ever want to put in
a sunset clause. If | could just reiterate to the Board, if there was an amendment that was going to
come forward, we did have that with street acceptance, that we had. People were concerned with the
overnight parking and they put in a sunset clause, to which it did come back on a targeted date to the
Infrastructure Committee we looked at it again, we said were there any complaints? And in looking at
the complete history and there were none, and so therefore we made the recommendation to accept
those several streets.
So | am just saying it could still be out there, if there is a fear of some pending issues or problems, we
could take a sunset approach to this and within the year come and look at it again and then make the
decision if we want to continue this. Now | understand there is livestock involved and you can easily
put into the sunset you are not going to eliminate the livestock. In other words, the current permits that
are issued if they were to be denied in the future with the sunset, you can say upon the natural
termination of life expectancy of those particular livestock. You don’t have to issue any new permits.
It seems to be the prudent way if you are guarded about something, it might be the better way just to
look at it and say let’s try it, let’s see if it works, if it doesn’t work we can adjust it at that particular time.
Thank you.
Alderwoman Kelly
So point of clarification, if we do a sunset clause, everybody who has a chicken coop, it is around the
accessory dwelling. So if you have 6 chickens and your 6 chickens die off, as long as you don't, |
believe it is move, there a couple things, but you can still have chickens. We can’t tell them once their
chickens die you’re done. It is about the accessory and not necessarily the animals inside. That’s how
| understood it from Director Marchant.
My second point would be that we as a Board have the opportunity to amend anything that we think
isn’t working and | think that is how this works. Director Marchant has willingly said she would do a
year report, see where we are, talk about any complaints, any adjustments that we need to make. |
think that makes sense, | don’t think we need a sunset clause in order to re-look at this and make sure
we are getting better all the time.
Alderman Lopez
| was really looking forward to the great chicken culling when the thousands of people buy chicken. |
would also have wanted to point out that the sunset clause is based on the coop but we could
potentially amend the chickens that are allowed in it and scale them down if they are a problem.
Alderwoman Melizzi-Golja
We discussed this in Committee and | referenced what happened with accessory dwellings and if you
remember we passed the initial legislation for accessory dwellings; there is no sunset clause but there
were concerns raised. So we came back to Committee, we amended it and the amended version was
then passed by the Board of Aldermen.
So again we could come back and we could decide to amend the number of chickens or we could just
say we are going to remove this. Those people who have chickens would keep them and we would
issue no further permits is my understanding. And | am looking at Attorney Bolton because that was the
understanding | had in terms of this piece of legislation.
