A failed bid to bring “backyard chickens” to Burlington is about to get another turn in the rotisserie as the city’s elected leaders prepare to revisit this much talked-about pandemic era proposal.
Burlington’s city council reached a consensus on Monday to proceed with this plan to allow the cultivation of small flocks of farm fowl, which narrowly tanked when it first came up for consideration in the spring of 2021.
The council’s previous lineup voted 3-to-2 to scuttle this prospective policy change, which would’ve allowed people in some residential zones to keep up to four hens in well-maintained coops for egg production or meat. Although it initially raised quite a stir among residents, this policy drew nary a peep when it came up for a public hearing, leaving skeptical council members to reject it as a potential regulatory nightmare.
This decision spelled the doom of backyard chickens in their original form. Yet, the “extra crispy” incarnation got a big boost last fall when three of the council’s five seats turned over during the general election. This electoral shakeup marked the return of Burlington’s former mayor Ian Baltutis as a rank-and-file member of the city council. Baltutis has been a vocal supporter of backyard chickens, as is Beth Kennett, who became the city’s new mayor in 2025. Meanwhile, Dejuana Bigelow, who joined the council in 2023, represents a potential third vote of support for this plan.
As a prelude to the prospective resurrection of backyard chickens, the council’s new lineup authorized a survey of the city’s residents earlier this year to gauge their continued interest in the idea.
Morgan Lasater, the city’s community engagement director, presented the results of this survey when the council convened its most recent monthly work session on Monday.
Lasater observed that this questionnaire had been available both online and in hard copy form for a period of about six weeks in June and July. She added that the 1,496 responses it ultimately drew were “so close” to the staggering number who had replied to an earlier survey that the city circulated before the council’s rejection of backyard chickens in 2021.
According to Lasater, 90.4 percent of the responses to this latest survey came from people who live within Burlington’s city limits. She added that 71.7 percent of all the respondents expressed their support for backyard chickens, while another 25.1 percent squawked up in opposition. A large number of people in both camps admitted their strongly-held views, which Lasater said seems to suggest deep “polarization” over this issue.
The vast majority of people who answered the survey favored some form of regulation regardless of how they felt about farm fowl in urban environments. Lasater said that 647 of the respondents desired rules to ensure coop standards, 597 favored a ban on roosters, and 579 were keen to limit flock sizes – with the preferred range being 4 to 6 hens. Another 468 were chiefly concerned with sanitation, 285 people with property setbacks, and 222 with registration and permitting, while 299 respondents wanted all chickens to remain outlawed and 287 were content with no regulations at all.
The council went on to direct the city’s planning staff to draw up a new policy based on the results of this survey. Mayor Beth Kennett suggested that this plan ought to include some consideration of commercial districts in addition to the residential zones that had been the focus of the policy proposal five years ago.
“I only know of one business owner who has expressed strong interest,” she told the rest of the council, “but I wouldn’t want to eliminate that possibility for them.”
Meanwhile, councilman Jeff Smythe confessed that he isn’t too keen to rely on the survey’s results to frame his own position on the legalization of hens.
“If it’s not scientifically based…and it can be manipulated by people who get their best friends to answer a certain way,” he noted before he joined the council’s consensus to proceed with the policy’s development. “I’m not going to base my decision on that data . . . but I definitely want to move in a direction where we have a draft document that we can edit.”
