Last-Minute Political Disputes Should Not Shut The Door On Citizen Engagement

Creative Citizen Urban Agriculture Project is Modest in Scale and Limited in Duration.

A growing circle of Lakewood residents want healthy, local food, and they’re taking action to get it right here in Lakewood through steps such as community gardens, CSAs (community-supported agriculture), farmer’s markets, rain barrels, composting and more. Their creativity and innovation is fast making Lakewood a statewide leader in urban agriculture.

Lakewood should be a city that welcomes creativity, innovation, and citizen involvement. We are sitting within a community that has a vast amount of untapped potential in urban sustainability. Many residents agree we should work to put Lakewood on the map as THE leader that other cities look towards when they want to know “how it’s done.”

Recently Mayor Summers sat down with a group of residents to listen to their proposal for such an effort: a yearlong pilot project that would allow three families to raise four hens apiece in Lakewood to provide fresh, healthy, nutritious eggs.  This group is part of a growing number of citizens committed to making Lakewood a benchmark city for sustainability. Interested neighbors like me joined these families in researching the feasibility of this project, together working as a collaborative and open group that is rapidly developing into an urban agriculture “brain trust” for Lakewood. Given that 65 percent of major American cities allow their residents to keep hens, we had a lot of good, solid experience and information available to us. In addition to our research, we sought out the advice of experts, attended a hen-keeping workshop, and went on field trips to residents in nearby cities who successfully keep hens.

Once we had our research, training, and planning prepared, we asked Mayor Summers to meet with us. We met at a local business, and Mayor Summers listened and asked questions in the manner of a leader that has his city and resident’s best interests at heart. We answered numerous, well thought-out questions from the mayor, including the typical questions people ask about potential hen impacts, including noise (almost none), smell (less than domestic pets), property values (no effects), and more. We demonstrated to the mayor that we didn’t propose this frivolously, and in fact, developed this pilot project with parameters so that the project is moderate in scale, safe, hygienic, and with a “good neighbor” approach in mind. We also gained the backing of veterinarians, many Lakewood businesses, and a unanimous vote of endorsement by the city’s official citizen animal advisory board. At the end of our discussion Mayor Summers agreed to grant specific, temporary exemptions to three families to run this pilot project for one year to test the viability of this idea, as he is allowed to do so under law.

However, once this exemption was agreed to, we learned that last-minute political disputes within City Council threaten to close the door on this innovative citizen project. Although we have been 100 percent transparent to city leadership and the public about our activities, we were told by some Council members they didn’t know about the project and they had concerns about the approval process. Consequently, at this moment the status of the proposed pilot project is unclear.

If last-minute action by Council goes forward to halt this project, it would send the message that citizen engagement that has followed a legal, open process is not welcome. Worse, it says that citizen engagement can be undercut by last-minute political maneuvers.

City leaders should welcome creativity from residents, not stifle innovation. We want to sincerely thank Mayor Summers for listening to a group of committed citizens who are donating their time, energy and other resources to make Lakewood a creative and dynamic community. He did the right thing by meeting with us, listening impartially to the facts, assessing our preparation, and making a decision to move forward with a pilot project that is of modest scale and for a limited time period. His approval made all of our hard work and our belief in our city pay off. Last-minute intervention by Council would tragically reverse that.