Casselberry weighs whether residents should be allowed backyard hens

Casselberry moved its backyard-hen fight into formal policy territory after a code-compliance complaint told Lindsay Feist she had 10 days to remove four hens she had raised for years, and a petition backing her quickly climbed past 750 signatures. Commissioners then voted to pause enforcement and asked staff to draft an ordinance that could legalize backyard chickens in the city.

The dispute now reaches the core question City Hall has to answer: who sets the rules for a neighborhood, residents pressing for a change, elected officials rewriting the code, or the existing enforcement system that keeps the current ban in place. Supporters of hens see them as a small-scale form of household food production and suburban self-sufficiency, while any city that writes a chicken ordinance also has to decide how to handle odor, noise, vermin and other nuisance complaints before the first coop goes up. Longwood’s own backyard-chicken program says those standards are meant to keep neighborhoods clean, safe and pleasant, which is the kind of balance Casselberry would have to write into law if it decides to move ahead.

Casselberry is not choosing in a vacuum. Seminole County already allows backyard chickens in unincorporated single-family areas, with up to four chickens, no roosters, personal-use-only rules, coop size limits and inspections tied to permits and building approvals. Longwood takes a similar but more tightly managed approach, allowing up to four chickens on occupied detached single-family property, capping the city at 50 permits, charging a $50 application fee and requiring an HOA letter when one applies. Longwood also says animal-control complaints go through Seminole County and that the city cannot act on anonymous complaints, underscoring how local governments can pair poultry rules with enforcement limits.

For Casselberry, the policy choice is now plain: keep the ban and continue enforcing it, or draft a set of rules that would let hens stay under defined conditions. However the commission writes that ordinance, it will set the precedent for the next dispute between a backyard coop, a neighbor’s complaint and the city code that sits between them.