Build Coop or Ask Town Permission First?

[thebruiser500]

I need chickens for my house and we have space here according to the town laws. They say it should be 25 feet away from any building which is fine. Though they also ask you get a permit first.

Should I just go ahead and build the chicken coop and get going here which would be very nice, or would you recommend actually getting a permit and asking the town for permission first and paying their $150 fee, before doing anything? It's annoying on principle that a person has to ask permission from the government. Not sure which route will work out best in the long term? Maybe getting government involved will just complicate things when they wouldn't have even noticed.

Thanks for sharing any personal experiences people have had with doing the permit process or just building the coop and figuring out any issues as you go along!

 

[Mother of Chaos]

Our city has an incredibly vague (although much cheaper) permitting process. I'm a reasonably law-abiding person, so I asked everyone I knew who had chickens how the process had gone, including five of my professors, and not a single one had gotten a permit, and nothing had ever happened.

I took care to stay within the wonderfully contradictory rules. If anyone ever makes a stink of it, I guess I'll go ahead and do it then.

- This is not terribly surprising about my city.

 

[5Australorpasaures]

It depends on how close and what kind of neighbors you have. It could go two ways. "THEY" could tell you remove it or call you on it to pay the fee. A lot of permit fees are just the governing bodies getting into your wallet with no follow-up inspections.

 

[rosemarythyme]

Worst case scenario if you build first and then try to get the permit after you might be ordered to tear down what you've built (as an unpermitted addition) so personally I'd get the permit first.

 

[BigBlueHen53]

Or you build it and somebody comes along and says, Hey, you got a permit for that? And you end up either having to tear it down and get rid of your chickens or pay a hefty fine. There's a thread here about a guy who had chickens and it really went south for him. He's been battling his community for quite some time trying to get the laws changed, gathering signatures, filing petitions, going to court, the whole nine yards. Easier to just get the permit, I would think. But that's me.

 

[AinaWGSD]

I agree, permits are a pain in the ass. Does the ordinance specify what the penalty for building without a permit? If not, there should be a place on the city website where you can look up the general penalties for not finding a permit. From there you can decide if it's worth the risk or not.

In my case I absolutely would do everything by the book. We live on the corner of a highway and a very busy local street so we can't really get away with anything. Every time we've started a major project (fencing our yard, building a gazebo) someone from the city shows up being nosey and seeing if everything is up to code Although at least when we were doing the fence they showed up when we were setting the posts. Someone a block or two down the road had their fence already built and had to tear half of it down because they were building a 6 foot privacy fence and were outside of the setback for that (ours would have been too if we were building a 6 foot or solid fence)