Collingswood weighs regulated backyard chicken program for residents
Collingswood’s chicken debate turned on a pilot ordinance, with a May 29 forum and an eight-member Penn Township model now in view.
Collingswood is no longer treating backyard hens as a casual neighborhood idea. The borough has put a proposed pilot ordinance, a public forum and an advisory-board model on the table as it weighs whether residents can keep chickens under a regulated program.
The borough scheduled a May 29 forum to talk through backyard chickens and the pilot ordinance, and it invited residents who supported the idea, opposed it or were still undecided. Collingswood Citizens for Backyard Chickens helped organize the event, which showed how far the issue had already moved from private interest to public process. The borough’s regular Board of Commissioners meetings are set for the first Monday of each month at 7 p.m. at the Community Center, 30 W. Collings Ave., giving the debate a fixed place on the municipal calendar.
What makes the discussion more than a simple yes-or-no vote is the way Collingswood is looking at rules. A representative from Woodbury Township presented a plan, developed with Graham Patterson, to regulate hens in residents’ backyards, and the council also explored creating a backyard chicken advisory board. That board concept drew on Penn Township’s model, where eight residents meet twice a year to help ensure compliance with local chicken-keeping ordinances. For a dense borough like Collingswood, the policy question is not just whether hens are charming or useful. It is whether the town can write standards that answer the usual neighbor concerns about noise, odor, predators, property values and fair enforcement.
Support from residents has not been abstract. Collingswood resident Kara Guerrieri has been among those lobbying municipal government for a backyard hen program, and Gwenne Baile, a longtime backyard chicken ordinance advocate, urged commissioners at a June 1 meeting to allow backyard chickens. That kind of pressure has been matched by a growing list of New Jersey examples. Florence Township adopted a backyard chicken ordinance in 2025, Andover Township approved one in 2024 that allowed a small number of female chickens on a non-commercial basis with neighborhood protections, and Wall Township adopted a 2025 ordinance allowing chickens and related structures on certain single-family residential and farm properties.
That is the real hinge in Collingswood now. The borough is not deciding chickens in the abstract, but whether a tightly regulated model can make hens workable in a walkable town where every new backyard rule has to survive the next-door test.
This article was produced by Prism’s automated news system from verified source data, official records, and press releases, then run through automated quality and moderation checks before publishing. The system is built and supervised by the people who set the standards it runs under. Read our full AI policy.
Did this article answer your question?
