First,
a disclosure, my wife and I are one of the four community supported
agriculture (CSA) members at Bad Seed Farm. As such, we have a vested
interest in seeing Bad Seed succeed.
Jonathan Bender wrote this post on Fat City earlier today. Since it updates Carolyn Szczepanski's post from earlier this week, we're cross posting.
Urban farmers, community leaders and city officials gathered before a crowd of close to 100 people at Bad Seed Farm's downtown market space on Tuesday night to discuss the process for potentially changing the development code in Kansas City.
"We
need to look at urban agriculture as a potential solution to problems
in the city, whether it's the use of vacant lots, the greening effort,
or health issues," said Daniel Heryer, who runs Bad Seed Farm with his
wife, Brooke Salvaggio.
Katherine Kelly, the director of the Kansas City Center for Urban Agriculture,
acted as moderator at the community meeting, which was designed to seek
input and find community advocates willing to serve on an urban
agriculture steering committee tasked with drafting an amendment to the
current ordinance that governs zoning and development.
"Ideally
we'll come up with templates that will serve as a model for other
municipalities," said Kelly of the committee, which will have a
separate subcommittee on raising livestock in an urban or suburban
setting.
City officials candidly discussed the reasons why Bad Seed Farm was
issued citations for violating the current development code, while also
recognizing that this issue requires the code to be updated.
"The
irony is that you have someone living on a property and taking care of
it, where somebody right now could go into a vacant lot and start
farming and they don't have to care what the property looks like," said
Patty Noll, an urban planner in the City Planning and Development Department.
Noll
will sit on the steering committee as a representative of the city. She
was part of a large contingent of public officials who were on hand to
answer questions and address concerns, including representatives of
Animal Control and Tom Coyle, the director of City Planning and
Development.
"The timing of this could not be better. Our
agenda called for looking at the code in September and here we are
meeting in October - that's pretty quick in government terms. We're
looking at something that can happen in 90 days from getting a code
drafted to a public hearing," said Coyle.
Councilman John
Sharp, who referred to Bad Seed Farm as "asset to his district,"
suggested that the city might begin addressing the issue even sooner.
"This
will be one of the recommendations from the mayor's New Tools Task
Force, that urban agriculture can help to stimulate and rejuvenate
neighborhoods," said Sharp, noting that the New Tools recommendations
could be before the City Council today.
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In I think Baltomore a number of years ago, there was a group of folks that feed a free meal at least once a week "in front of city hall" They were also doing a project colled "The Green City Project" Where they not only would get the neighbor-hoods together a build community Gardens, butr they also would go to apt. complxes, condos, & even Buisnesses, & get them to build gardens on top of there (flat) roofs. I'm thinking mabe ya-all would be intrusted in promotinbg such a direction hear. I'm sure ya-all could get info. from them if trhere still around.
'Good fortune'
"Nature"
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