Here We Go Again

I received a voicemail from a reporter at the Columbus Dispatch today. She had also emailed earlier today. Here’s the email she sent:

Mr. Shingler: I am a reporter at The Columbus Dispatch. I am writing a story for Tuesday’s paper about how the county and the township are trying to get you to clean up your property at 2624 Woodland Ave. in Mifflin Township. Obviously, I don’t want to write this w/o talking to you first. I only just today found your website, which led me to a good phone number for you. Up to that point, I did not realize you were the owner of this business so I had not found a good phone number,

You can reach me on my cell phone at xxxxxxxxxxx.
Again, I would hate to run the story without hearing what you have to say.
Thanks.

xxxxxxxxxxxx
The Columbus Dispatch newspaper

(She didn’t really write all those X’s. I redacted her name and number out of respect for her privacy.)

In the voice mail, she referred to several complaints from neighbors. This was quite disturbing to me, not least of all because not one neighbor had contacted me about ANY concerns. We got a letter two or three weeks ago from the county building inspector. It said that we had to either apply for permits to remedy “the violations” (which weren’t listed) or apply for a permit to tear the house down. If we didn’t, the letter said, we’d be fined $100 a day. It said that for a list of the violations, we were to call the building inspector. There was a deadline of something like ten days before the fines went into effect.

This was fairly alarming, as we were due to sign a contract with a roofing company in just two days. My father-in-law offered to pay for a new roof, and we were about to sign a contract and make a down payment of several thousand dollars to put a roof on a house that the county was now threatening to tear down if we didn’t meet some list of demands–a list we never saw.

Obviously, this letter from the county meant that repairs on the roof had to be put on hold until we found out what the demands were and whether we were going to be able to meet them. The letter was addressed to Mayda, so she called. She was told that the inspector was out, and that if she wanted to reach him, she needed to call between 7:00 a.m. and 9:00 a.m. because he left the office at 9:00. Apparently, he can’t be reached by cell phone.

Mayda called the next day as I got Noah ready for school. She asked for the list of violations. He said he’d like her to meet him at the house so they could walk around and he’d show her what all was wrong. In other words, he didn’t have a list of violations and wanted to be given a tour of the place so he could go fishing for violations. She refused. He’s either got a list or he doesn’t. We already know that trick. Code enforcement did the same thing to a neighbor of ours here on Paul Drive. They cited him for all sorts of code violations that weren’t visible from the street, things that wouldn’t bother anybody who wasn’t trespassing. There’s no way we’re inviting someone to do an open-ended search to try to come up with stuff to ding us for.

When she told the inspector about our plans to replace the roof, he suddenly became more accommodating. He hadn’t realized that the house was actually being worked on. He thought it was abandoned. He told Mayda to go ahead and have the roof done. He said that as long as we were working on it, they would “work with” us. Personally, I don’t find that completely reassuring. I don’t want a $13,000 roof put on the place just to have someone come along and say, “That’s good! Now fix this and this and this and this.” We wouldn’t be able to afford those follow-up repairs, and we’d be right back in the same position. All the same, Mayda apparently felt comfortable enough committing her dad’s money, so we went ahead and signed. The roofers are supposed to be starting work this Wednesday.

The inspector said that he had been contacted by the Mifflin Township Police. They said they were concerned that someone would break into the place. Apparently they, too, thought the house was abandoned, despite the well-tended garden in the front yard, the mowed lawn, the lights I’m paying to keep on, the leaking garden hose on the front porch, and the fact that I’m there for several hours every day, usually with a car or truck parked in the driveway.

That phone conversation between Mayda and the building inspector was the last we heard anything from the county. We’ve heard nothing directly from the township, and nothing at all from the neighbors–except for Edna, who asked me to trim some shrubbery near her driveway. I did better than that. I bush hogged it right to the ground. Imagine my surprise, then, when I got a call from a reporter saying she was doing a story on “several complaints from neighbors” about code violations and how the township and county both were coming after me.

I asked the reporter about what, specifically, the neighbors had complained. The roof was one thing. The general dilapidated appearance of the place–the way it had looked for years before we bought it–was another. They claimed they’d seen rats run from the property–I’ve never seen any sign of them in the house, but their presence on the property would be no surprise to anyone who’s heard me complain about the deer, foxes, opossums, mink, and raccoons. (It is part of a larger forest, after all, and there have been rats in this whole neighborhood for years before we came along.) They also complained that they suspected I was raising chickens there in violation of code.

OF COURSE I’m raising chickens on the chicken farm. I have a website on the world wide web saying as much. I’ve stated on public record that I raise chickens when I testified at listening sessions held by the USDA and the ODA. I gave a two-hour workshop on raising backyard chickens at the OEFFA annual convention a couple years ago where I showed slides of my birds. I showed more slides when I was on a panel of presenters talking about urban agriculture at the Wexner Center earlier this month. And then, three weeks ago, I gave a tour to over twenty visitors who came to see my chickens at our property on Woodland. Rocky, the guy who lives directly across the street from our house there has come over to ask me about buying eggs. I’ve seen him at farmers markets, too. I’ve actually given Edna chicken and eggs. She’s called me before to warn me about predators and trespassers. Another neighbor, Woody, has come over to chat while I’ve weeded the garden, and I told him about the chickens. About the only people in that immediate area who haven’t talked with me lately are the ones who think our yard and driveway are their parking lot. They’re no doubt miffed that I put up logs to block them from pulling into our yard, but I don’t know that that has anything to do with these “several complaints from neighbors.” [Edit: This has been confirmed since the publication of the newspaper article and checking the name of the complainant against the county auditor’s records.]

So, yes, I’m raising chickens at Woodland, and NO, it’s not a violation. Sure, the guy from Economic Planning and Development who told me I couldn’t raise chickens on Paul Drive also told me I couldn’t raise them at Woodland, but when I asked him why, all he could do was cite a code about agriculture in sub-developments
that are more than 30% developed. But his own department tells us that 2624 Woodland isn’t in a subdevelopment; therefore, the rule does not apply. Furthermore, if we could get just another quarter-acre of adjacent land and have it re-platted so the whole thing is a single property, we’d have enough land to qualify for a state exemption to any municipal regulations against agriculture.

At least for now, though, there aren’t any municipal regulations against agriculture there. When Mayda had called the Mifflin Township offices to ask, the woman who answered the phone said they hadn’t made any rules one way or the other and just followed county rules. Furthermore, she added that if she had five acres, she’d have horses. The county rule is that if you have more than one acre, you can have livestock, so long as your city, village, or township doesn’t have a rule saying otherwise. We have more than one acre, and Mifflin Twp. has no rules about livestock, so I’m not breaking any rules by having them.

Mayda’s getting discouraged. She said to me today that this seems like a lot of trouble to go through for something I’m not even making any money at. “If you were making money hand over fist, I’d say f@*# ’em! But you’re not even making any money. It’s like you’re putting yourself at the center of all this negative attention for nothing.” She wondered aloud whether I wouldn’t be better off just sticking with the woodworking and just keeping a few hens for ourselves. If I gave up, though, I don’t think they’d allow us that option.

I told the reporter, just to add another layer of complexity to the story, that I’m on the newly formed Franklin County Local Food Council, and that part of our mission is to create policy recommendations for local municipal governments about urban agriculture.

There are so many people who support this farm. I wish they could buy out all these cranky busybodies and live near it. Mayda and I have daydreamed before about the creation of an “urban agriculture zone,” or even more generally, an “urban entrepreneurial zone” where home-based businesses and agriculture are encouraged, not penalized. I just get so tired of this crap. Why can’t people mind their own business? Do I call the authorities to complain about the neighbors’ teenagers and their friends coming and going at all hours of the night? Do I expect bureaucrats to force my neighbors to install edible landscaping because it’s what I’d like to look at? Do I complain to the press because I don’t think my neighbors should be doing what they do for a living? Why should their opinions have any more power than mine?

Forget farmland preservation. What we need is some farmland reclamation. The whole of Mifflin Township used to be one giant farm, famed for the quality of the wheat that grew here. Now if you tried to grow wheat here, someone would probably call the cops to report the tall grass. I consider such people a nuisance, their attitudes a public menace, and their chemical-doused lawns an eyesore. I don’t want that element blighting my neighborhood. I want a neighborhood that grows food and values people who do.