West Chester Chickens: The roots of a community built on self-reliance
Those pesky zoning people are back at it in West Chester, Ohio picking on Danielle Richardson who recently moved to one of the most successful and financially lucrative areas in the Midwest. Like cowards in the night, they left a message on her door informing her that she would not be able to keep the nine chickens that she has in her back yard because it’s in violation to a ridiculous zoning resolution. Richardson was told that her pet chickens would have to go because West Chester Twp. does not permit farm animals in residential neighborhoods, according to spokeswoman Barb Wilson. “In our definition, when you talk about farm animals, poultry are clearly identified as such, chickens, horses, cows, sheep, goats would be considered farm animals.”
http://www.journal-news.com/news/news/woman-will-battle-township-to-keep-backyard-chicke/nfYCP/
What Danielle Richardson doesn’t know is that the zoning terrorists who left the note on her door are using zoning to carry West Chester Twp. into a city classification as local progressives understand that before such a measure can be made, references to West Chester’s rural past must be erased. Farm animals have been a part of West Chester’s past for as long as I can remember. I remember when cows came up to the fence behind the Wendy’s restaurant by the corner of Cox Road and Tylersville, and half a dozen homes between there and the Lakota high school had farm animals around their homes. That symbol of self-reliance, of the farmer and country living is what made West Chester attractive for development, because people did not want to live in a city and liked driving by large fields, cows, horses and other farm animals—images that they couldn’t get in a city environment.
But slowly these new residents have changed the nature of West Chester from a rural community to one of a progressive New England suburb, and with that image has come a zoning adherence to ICLEI, (International Council for Local Environmental Initiatives) which is the architect behind the United Nations Agenda 21 strategies. The eventual goal of Agenda 21 is to pull residents out of the suburbs and back into the cities where their behavior can be carefully controlled through regulation—which is what is happening to Richardson.
Zoning officials do not want residents to be self-reliant, to have chickens where they can produce their own eggs. In Richardson’s neighborhood she gives her neighbors free eggs as a gift. This is something the ICLEI people do not want to see—because they want to control the issuance of eggs. They want Richardson to get her eggs from the local Kroger where regulators have their hands in on the action. They certainly don’t want to support self-sustaining lifestyles—which is the real message behind their angst toward farm animals. They certainly aren’t protecting the home values of neighborhoods with such zoning regulations, because the homes were built around the farm culture that is at the roots of West Chester.
My grandparents had a farm on Seward road very close to the Erie Canal which was some of the best farmland in the world. The valley below Beckett Ridge which flooded often had some wonderful farms which extended all the way to the west into Fairfield. My grandfather married my grandmother by taking a canal boat to the east where he met her at a dance at Port Union, which was next to the current drive-thru that is diagonal from the United Dairy Farmers at the corner of Port Union Road and 747. Many people have no knowledge that the Erie Canal ran right along those railroad tracks and is still visible as a relic to West Chester’s past. I grew up knowing many of the farmers in the region. They bailed hay, slaughtered cows, had horses, goats and just about every kind of animal imaginable. At a minimum they had chickens—because that is how they had eggs for breakfast. Over the last 30 years, people who wanted to be close to these activities moved to West Chester, people like Danielle Richardson.
With the new homes came pretentious progressives and their big government regulations and social tampering trained in the ways of ICLEI. The far away entity of The United Nations is jealous of American self-reliance, and they certainly find the farmers of North America repulsive—and through Agenda 21 wish them regulated out of existence. That is how zoning ordinances like the one Barb Wilson cited came to be. But that is not how it’s supposed to be. Those ICLEI worshippers desire to change West Chester, not preserve it, and getting rid of chickens in a neighborhood are part of their strategy.
Danielle Richardson made some good arguments in her reasoning for keeping her pet chickens. She used all the ICLEI buzz words, like “sustainable living” and “green” friendly which are the weapons zoning typically uses to alter behavioral lifestyles. After all, what is greener than raising chickens and eating the eggs produced by them? But that is not what zoning has in mind when they talk about “sustainable living.” They wish to handcuff human beings so that nature can prevail and incorporate all living into city-state control and regulation. And they plan to pay for their offensive through taxes that adversely destroy private ownership of property. Danielle Richardson took the spirit of West Chester back the other way—toward self reliance, which is what ICLEI finds so repulsive about American lifestyles.
West Chester has within its zoning administrators, as does virtually every community in America—progressive terrorists who salivate for the opportunity to regulate society into a direction of their strategic choosing. That choosing was not shaped by the traditions of a community like West Chester but the far away fools at The United Nations and their ICLEI arm of bureaucrats. It is likely that Richardson had no idea that she would cause so much of a ruckus over her personal desire to have chickens on her property, but ICLEI seeks to regulate how private property owners use their land. The strategy at ICLEI is to impose themselves on private property ownership to the point where taxation and heavy regulation make investment not attractive. At that point government will own those properties and control what goes on there—and chickens will be a thing of the past. Government regulators want to be the one to place eggs on the doorsteps of neighbors instead of Danielle Richardson because they want to gain control over what people eat and when they eat it. In that way, they want to change West Chester, not preserve it. They want to remove from its past the image of self-reliance and personal sovereignty and change it into a city of tax producing citizens under the control of petty regulators and zoning officials.
I have a personal recommendation for Danielle Richardson–at the zoning hearing, tell those idiots what you really think of them. Let them have it, because the next step in that process is in your favor. There are friendly ears above the zoning bureaucrats who know exactly what is going on, and you’ll get to keep your chickens. Just don’t yield to the zoning people. This fight goes far beyond chickens and eggs—but to the heart of what it means to be a property owner in America—during a time when the rest of the world wants to be the supplier of the eggs. Yet they wish to do so without having chickens to lay them. ICLEI is about to discover which comes first, the chicken or the egg. Danielle Richardson already knows that answer—and the rest of the world is about to find out. They want to control the eggs, but they don’t respect the chickens that make them.
Rich Hoffman www.OVERMANWARRIOR.com
