Worcester committee to city manager: Hatch a task force for raising chickens
The movement to raise and keep chickens in Worcester has reached the next stage of the pecking order.
The city’s Committee on Economic Development is officially asking City Manager Eric Batista to create a task force to explore whether it is possible for residents to own and raise chickens in the city.
The task force, if created, will also be in charge of studying the methods other communities use to allow residents to raise and keep chickens as well as the challenges they face, according to the official order from the committee.
The Worcester City Council will vote on the order at Tuesday night’s council meeting.
The Planning Board voted unanimously at its April 9 meeting and sent a letter urging the council to tell the city administration to move forward on a petition allowing the raising of egg-laying chickens. The petition was presented before the Worcester City Council on Feb. 25 by resident Joseph Mangiameli.
“I think this board is clearly pro-chicken,” said board member Conor McCormack during the meeting. “The City Council needs to move on this.”
This isn’t the first time the Planning Board has recommended the council allow chickens to be raised in Worcester.
In 2020 and 2022, the board wrote to the council to address the matter but it did not, according to Planning Board Chair Albert LaValley.
“We don’t understand why the city has been unable to move this forward. We urge them in the strongest possible way to direct the administration to do that,” LaValley said during the April 9 meeting.
In his petition, Mangiameli wrote that the price of eggs is one of the reasons residents should be able to raise egg-laying chickens in Worcester.
In March, the average price of one dozen large, grade-A eggs in the United States was $6.23, according to data from the Consumer Price Index . Egg prices in March were the highest they have ever been in five years. The price of eggs has continued to drop month after month. In July, the average price of one dozen large, grade-A eggs in the United States was $3.60, according to the Consumer Price Index.
“In addition, eggs could be shared with other family and neighbors, which would be a benefit to them as well,” Mangiameli wrote in the petition.
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