The Jefferson City Council decided earlier this week to deny amending its zoning ordinance to allow for special exceptions for livestock to be permissible in City limits.

A recommendation was made by the City’s Planning and Zoning Commission on July 23rd to allow for a variance to the City’s ordinance to handle any request to house livestock in the City’s limits be handled on a case-by-case basis.  They chose not to change the ordinance due to what the Commission felt would be an overwhelming amount of requests and/or a quickly fading trend.

However, the Council felt that the cost to redo the language in the City’s code, along with the possibility of not getting that many requests which led to the Council making its decision to disapprove it.

City Administrator Mike Palmer explains that the standard procedure to change the City’s code includes a $250 fee to the applicant and he talks about what those fees cover and how that played into the final decision by the Council.

“What those fees cover is to do publications, if there’s a public hearing coming up is to send out mailings to adjoining property owners.  We said in the Council meeting, probably $250 is break even at best, most times.  So that’s something to really consider is an applicant want to pay $250 and may or may not get through this whole process.”

The original request was made by resident Joyce Allender who went to the Planning and Zoning meeting to have her daughter’s three chickens to be allowed in town.  Had the request been approved by the Council, it would’ve gone to the Board of Adjustments and Allender would’ve had to pay $250.

Palmer feels that the Planning and Zoning did their job of looking at the topic from a zoning aspect and the City Council did their job of considering their constituents comments and the cost of having to change legislation.

He adds that the City staff tries to help a property owner by telling them all the different options before they get to the point of having to pay the standardized fee.