Government
Residents Keep Asking Marengo About Chickens. Here Is What the Record Says.
Thursday, September 3, 2026
Chickens are not allowed inside Marengo's city limits. The city says so on its own website, and the code lets the council make exceptions, which it has done at least once.
The question of whether to change that has come before the council three times in the past four years. It has produced one vote, two discussions, a staff recommendation the council did not take, and a steady trickle of residents asking when it will come up again.
What Staff Put in Front of the Council in 2023
Backyard chickens came up in the mayor's report in January 2023, with a note about the price of eggs and the fact that the city code barred them. Staff took the question up that spring, citing the council's interest, and reported that it had also received several resident inquiries in support.
By July, staff had done the research and written an ordinance.
The memo that went to the council surveyed eleven communities. Six allowed backyard chickens, including Hampshire, Elgin, Johnsburg, Carpentersville, Genoa and St. Charles. Five had turned the idea down: Rockford in 2022, Crystal Lake in 2020, Cary and North Aurora in 2015, and Lake in the Hills in 2012.
Staff reported both sides of it. The communities that said no "all had similar concerns, such as noise, smell, and a possible increase of predators (raccoons, foxes, and coyotes)." The communities that said yes reported the opposite. Staff wrote that they described "creating a sense of community, distributing eggs to neighbors, and a decrease of insects," and that "none of the communities expressed concerns regarding an increase in animal predators, smell or noise." Across every community researched, "only one municipality had a violation where a rooster had to be removed by the homeowner."
The ordinance staff attached, Ordinance 23-7-4, ran five pages and built a program rather than simply permitting hens.
A license would have been required before anyone kept a chicken, with an annual fee set by the council. Applications were due by December 1 for the following calendar year, and a license could be revoked, with an appeal to the council. No household could keep more than four chickens. Roosters were excluded.
Coops and runs had to sit at least ten feet from any property line and twenty-five feet from the nearest adjacent habitable building. A coop could be no larger than sixty-four square feet and no taller than ten feet, with four square feet of floor space per bird if the birds had a run and ten if they did not. Coops had to be built so predators, birds and rodents could not get in, and kept clean and dry. No coop could be built without a city building permit. Staff wrote that review and approval of a coop "would be handled by the City Code Enforcement Officer."
Fines ran from $75 to $750. The packet included a license application and a two-page fact sheet for residents.
Staff recommended the council approve it, along with a $50 annual license fee. Staff noted that fees in the communities researched ran from $20 to $75.
On July 24, 2023, the council voted it down, two in favor and six against.
The minutes of that meeting record no council discussion of the ordinance itself, so the reasoning of most of those six is not in the record. Two things around it are. A resident spoke against allowing chickens during public comment that night. And a month earlier, one alderperson had told the council that the feedback reaching them about the idea was negative.
The Question Came Back Twice in 2025
It returned first on May 12, 2025, as an item on the posted agenda. Five residents spoke about it during public comment. Four asked the council to allow chickens. One said they did not belong in the city, on the grounds that the rules could not be enforced.
Then the council took the item up itself, and what members said is the most favourable thing in this record for the people asking. Three alderpersons each said in a single sentence that they were in support of allowing chickens. A fourth said they were not opposed to chickens, but that the city did not have the staff to maintain enforcement of an ordinance.
Nothing was before the council to vote on, and nothing was voted on.
Four weeks later, in council reports, an alderperson asked for an update. The city attorney said it would be on the next agenda as a meeting item.
June 23, and a Different Document
The city administrator's memorandum in that night's packet asked for no action and recommended none, and said that if the council wanted to pursue the topic, staff would need further direction.
Two things were attached. One was a set of ordinances from the Village of Hampshire, which had adopted a chicken licensing program of its own. The other was a new draft ordinance, described in the memo as "proposed/draft ordinance language for use by the City of Marengo," prepared by the city attorney's office and marked by hand, in capitals across the top of the first page, "CITY ATTY DRAFT."
That draft is a different document from the one the council rejected in 2023. It runs three pages rather than five. It confines hens to the rear yard of a detached single-family home and excludes roosters twice over, once by definition and again by striking chickens from the city's list of prohibited animals while writing roosters into it. It requires rodent-proof feed containers, clean water, covered waste storage that never enters the city's sewers, and a coop attached to or surrounded by a run and built to keep predators out. It forbids keeping chickens commercially, producing fertilizer from the waste commercially, and selling or advertising either the birds or their eggs. Penalties run from $100 to $750 per offense, plus the city's legal costs, with every day counted separately.
It has no license. No permit, no application, no fee, no cap on how many households may keep birds, no limit on how many hens each may have, and no required distance between a coop and a property line.
One member was absent that night. Three of those present spoke.
One alderperson said the city was not in a position to enforce regulations it put in place, because it did not have the staff. A second agreed, and tied the question to the city's work on adjudication and code enforcement, saying that with success in that area the council would be in a strong position to continue the conversation, with a commitment from the council in the future. A third said they would support allowing chickens, provided the city had guidelines in place, approved permits, and ordinances it could control.
It is worth putting those comments next to the document that prompted them. The draft on the table that night had no license, no permit, no cap and no setbacks. The member who conditioned support on approved permits was looking at a draft that did not contain one.
The council then took an informal straw poll, which came out four to three against, according to the Northwest Herald's account of the meeting. It was not a recorded vote, and the approved minutes do not contain one.
Later the same night, under new business, the council voted 7-0 to adopt an administrative adjudication process, which had been item 5a on the agenda posted five days earlier. That system lets the city hear routine code cases before a local hearing officer rather than in circuit court, though the courts still handle appeals and the collection of unpaid fines. Staff told the council the first hearing would be held in July.
What the Neighbors Did
Hampshire, roughly eleven miles south and slightly east of Marengo and almost exactly the same size at the 2020 census, is the comparison Marengo's own staff put in front of its council, in 2023 and again in 2025. The choice is the city's, not this newspaper's.
Hampshire started before Marengo voted. Its board adopted chicken regulations on June 2, 2022, and deliberately started small: four hens per property, roosters banned, a $20 annual license, and the program capped at ten licensed households as a one-year pilot. In a survey of eleven area municipalities prepared for that same meeting, Hampshire's staff listed Marengo among the towns that did not allow chickens.
A year in, Hampshire's staff reported that all ten licenses had been taken and that the village had received "no code enforcement complaints regarding chickens since the ordinance was passed." In October 2023 the board raised the limit to eight hens and the number of licenses to fifteen.
By early 2025 the village had a waiting list. A memorandum prepared for a March 6, 2025 board meeting that was not held, and carried forward into the next packet, reported that Hampshire had "issued the maximum fifteen (15) chicken licenses annually and has a waiting list for property owners who would like to obtain a chicken license," and that "since the inception of the chicken license program, the Village has not received complaints for those that have obtained a chicken license." The resolution drafted alongside it put the same point more cautiously, reciting that the village "has not received a lot of complaints regarding chickens."
Staff recommended raising the cap to twenty-five. On March 20, 2025, with the agenda, the memo and the draft resolution all still saying twenty-five, the board voted instead to increase the number of licenses "from 15 to unlimited." The vote was four to two. The minutes record no discussion.
What Hampshire kept is as telling as what it removed. The board voted away the ceiling on how many households could take part, though the village's own licensing page still tells residents the number is limited to fifteen. It kept the license, the annual renewal, the rooster ban, the setbacks, a screening requirement, and a rule that a coop needs its own building permit and a survey showing where it will sit.
Residents Have Kept Asking
Public comment has been the channel available since, and residents have used it.
In November 2025 a resident asked the council for an update, noting that six months had passed since the last discussion, and a second resident echoed the request. Another asked in February 2026. In April 2026 one of the May 2025 speakers asked again when the topic would come back to an agenda.
What Has Changed, and What Has Not
The administrative adjudication process adopted in June 2025 is running. And on August 24, 2026, the council adopted a rewrite of several code sections staff grouped under nuisance abatement and code enforcement. That package began as six sections and was narrowed to three, covering junk and inoperable vehicles, the surfaces vehicles may be stored on, and fireworks. Two sections came out before the agenda was posted and a third was withdrawn on the floor. What passed amended the same nuisance chapter the 2025 chicken draft had pointed at, renumbered from Chapter 12 to Chapter 92 when the council adopted the city's recodified municipal code two weeks earlier.
What the record does not show is what changed about the city's capacity between 2023, when staff wrote that a code enforcement officer would review coop permits, and 2025, when members said the city lacked the staff to enforce an ordinance. Neither measure adopted since added staff. The member who tied the question to adjudication and code enforcement did not condition it on adopting those tools, but on seeing success in that area.
One obligation would apply whatever Marengo decides. Highly pathogenic avian influenza has been circulating in the United States since 2022, and Illinois has recorded it in commercial and backyard flocks alike. From February to June of 2025 the state suspended the exhibition and sale of poultry at swap meets, exhibitions, flea markets and auction markets, and that October the state veterinarian urged producers to move birds indoors and away from contact with wild birds. The Illinois Department of Agriculture asks poultry owners to register their premises, which is a free and voluntary program. Reporting is not voluntary. Avian influenza is a reportable disease in Illinois, and a flock owner who suspects it must tell the department immediately. Those duties follow the birds rather than the ordinance, and none of it appears anywhere in Marengo's record.
The State Briefly Took an Interest
In February 2026 a bill was introduced in the Illinois House that would have taken the decision away from Marengo.
House Bill 4764 would have given residents the right to keep hens on the property where they live, subject to what it called reasonable municipal regulation. Cities would have kept authority over setbacks, sanitation, enclosure standards, nuisance control, predator-proofing and the number of hens allowed. What they would have lost is the ability to say no. A local ordinance could stand only if it did not have the effect of precluding backyard chickens, language that on its face would reach a flat prohibition. The bill also barred cities from requiring neighbors' consent, applied to home rule communities, and would have let a resident sue a municipality that enforced or attempted to enforce an ordinance violating the act, and recover attorney's fees.
It did not advance. It was assigned to a committee in March, missed its deadline, and was sent back to the Rules Committee under a procedural rule that applies automatically. It has had no action since, and the spring session adjourned on June 1. It could still move during the fall veto session, which runs November 17 through 19 and December 1 through 3, or in any lame-duck session before the new General Assembly is sworn in on January 13. It expires then.
Where It Stands
Chickens remain on Marengo's list of prohibited animals, and the code allows the council to grant permission for one anyway. It did so in May 2011, approving a variance for the owner of a Telegraph Street property to keep up to fifteen chickens, minus roosters, along with four beehives. That permission ran to the owner rather than to the parcel.
The ordinance staff recommended in 2023 has not been revived. The draft the city attorney's office prepared in 2025 has never been voted on. The city administrator's memo said what would have to happen next: "If, at the close of discussion, City Council would like to further pursue this topic, additional direction for staff will be needed."
No such direction has been given.
Marengo Weekly reviewed City Council minutes and meeting packets from 2011 through 2026, both draft ordinances and the 2023 staff memorandum as circulated to the council, the Village of Hampshire's ordinances, board packets and approved minutes from 2022 through 2026, published reporting on the June 2025 meeting, guidance and outbreak notices from the Illinois Department of Agriculture, and the text and status of House Bill 4764 of the 104th General Assembly. Consistent with our practice on council coverage, votes are reported as tallies and individual members are not named.
