Resident tussles with Barre Town over her chickens
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Kathy Rubalcaba displays some of her Layed in Vermont brand eggs inside a fenced-in chicken yard outside of her home on Church Street in East Barre. STEFAN HARD/TIMES ARGUS |
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By David Delcore TIMES ARGUS STAFF - Published: September 8, 2009
BARRE TOWN – When it comes to Kathy Rubalcaba's chickens, the eggs definitely came first. Then came her battles with the town, which the East Barre woman says she's been fighting ever since the first few of them hatched about 18 months ago.
Rubalcaba's struggles will continue tonight when the town's selectboard considers the case of a chicken that reportedly flew the coop and a rooster that allegedly crowed at the crack of dawn.
Both birds belong to Rubalcaba, and both were the subject of separate complaints issued last month under the town's "Nuisance Control Ordinance."
They aren't the first, according to Rubalcaba, who was in district court late last week for a status conference in another case of fowl play – this one involving a months-old complaint of another crowing rooster. She has also seen one chicken-related ticket issued by the town's police department tossed out by a judge in the past year.
"This is silliness," says Rubalcaba. "They're just chickens!"
In a rural state that values agriculture, Rubalcaba's battles are not unfamiliar, those pitting the rights of small-farm operations and a valued tradition of growing local against neighbors whose objections may range from the animals themselves, their waste or smell, or the noise they make.
According to Rubalcaba, it all started about a year-and-a-half ago when she decided to raise chickens on the quarter-acre lot where her Church Street home is built.
Rubalcaba says she wanted to convert a neighbor's shack – he lived "a street away" and was willing to part with the accessory structure if she was willing to move it – into a chicken coop and construct a chain link enclosure right outside so her chickens could get some fresh air.
However, the coop – now one of three such structures on her property – wasn't built without some resistance from town officials, according to Rubalcaba, who says she was initially told she couldn't raise chickens in a residential area.
That was in May 2008 – about the same time the town issued the same warning to Joanne Page, who lives on nearby Websterville Road.
Fearing the hefty daily fine that was cited in the correspondence she received from the town, Page, who dropped by Rubalcaba's home to pick up some eggs on Monday, says she sold her chickens that day.
Rubalcaba didn't blink and was ultimately granted a hearing before the local development review board. In what it viewed as a Solomonesque decision, Rubalcaba says that panel agreed to let her have up to two dozen chickens, no roosters and required the shed she wanted to use as a chicken coop be moved to the opposite side of her house, in order to appease the owner of a then-vacant residential property located right next door.
Still not satisfied, Rubalcaba, a self-described "pit bull," dug in her heels, did a little research and told town officials she didn't believe they had any authority to regulate her agricultural endeavors.
"That's what people don't know and the towns don't want them to know," Rubalcaba says. "In a state with (a statue of) the Goddess of Agriculture on the top of the Statehouse how can I not have a few chickens in my back yard?"
While then it was just a few, now it's way more than that.
In April, Rubalcaba says her job as an audio-visual specialist at Norwich University in Northfield was "eliminated," and she decided to make her hobby her work.
"Now I'm a full-time chicken farmer," says Rubalcaba, who has more than 100 exotic egg-laying chickens, and several roosters living in three separate sheds, including one that was built recently with a small business grant she received from Central Vermont Community Action Council.
The 100-bird estimate doesn't count the two chicks that hatched early Monday afternoon in one of the three egg-filled incubators that are humming away in the corner of Rubalcaba's dining room, or the ones currently residing in the large cardboard box on her front porch.
Rubalcaba says she's thinking big and has high hopes for her fledging business, "Layed In Vermont." She says cartoonist Jeff Danzigger, one of her former high school teachers, is working on a logo for her and a Web site, www.layedinvermont.com is about to be launched. The business will sell both locally hatched chicks and fresh layed eggs, she says.
However, Rubalcaba acknowledges some of her neighbors aren't wild about her business plans and have complained about the operation. As a result, the town has issued a handful of tickets under its nuisance control ordinance and the selectboard will conduct a hearing on the two most recent complaints tonight.
According to Rubalcaba, one of those complaints involves a chicken named "Hilda" that escaped from her shed when someone pried a screen off one of the windows last month. The chicken barely survived a run-in with a fox and returned "dazed and confused," but not before causing unspecified "damage" to a neighboring property.
"It's a chicken," Rubalcaba says. "How much damage could it do?"
Rubalcaba says the latter complaint involves a rooster that was a little too vocal one morning.
"Dogs bark, roosters crow, (faulty) mufflers are loud, you live in a village there's noise," she says.
Rubalcaba and the selectboard will hear more about the complaints during a hearing that will feature witnesses being called to testify and cross-examined before the board decides how to respond.
Rubalcaba says she's hopeful the board will view the complaints as isolated incidents and wish her well. However, she says she's prepared to fight if they don't.
"I'll take this all the way to the (Vermont) supreme court," she says.
An eighth generation Vermonter who grew up in Calais and has lived for nearly three decades in East Barre, Rubalcaba, 47, is adamant about her property rights.
"This is my land. This is Vermont. This town was founded on agriculture," she says. "I'm going to have my chickens and I'm going to have as many as I want."
Rubalcaba retained Montpelier attorney Paul Gillies to handle one of the earlier complaints that inexplicably ended up before a district court judge instead of the selectboard. Gillies argued among other things that Rubalcaba was exempt from nuisance-based claims by the Vermont Right to Farm Act and that the town did not have the statutory authority to regulate chickens.
"…Without specific authority granted by the Legislature, Barre Town cannot enact an ordinance which attempts to regulate a chicken break from an owner's enclosure," he wrote in a motion to dismiss, noting that state law specifically provides for penalties for those who knowingly permit their farm animals to trespass on other people's properties.
"… This is an escape not a release," he wrote at the time.
Rubalcaba says the same is true of the latest incident, though this time she is facing a fine of up to $500 instead of a $75 ticket.
Meanwhile, Rubalcaba, whose roosters crowed occasionally, but far from constantly Monday afternoon, is facing a separate $500 fine under a separate provision of the town ordinance that she believes violates the Right to Farm Act.
"You can't do this," she says. "You can't harass farmers and if you have one chicken, one cow, (or) a row of corn you're a farmer."
david.delcore@timesargus.com
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