Saturday, April 15, 2017

Austin subsidizes urban chickens

Filed under news of the ridiculous: The City of Austin will train you in chicken-keeping and subsidize your coop. Why? Since this comes under the purview of Austin Resource Recovery (aka recycling), this may be a substitute for the much-hated proposal to require Austin residents to compost food scraps, a stinky solution to a non-problem.

I admit to being curious as to whether any new positions were created in the city bureaucracy to start and expand the chicken programs. I await clarification from the head of Austin Resource Recovery's Department of Chicken-Keeping, or perhaps the head of city chicken advocacy. Will the program expand into goat-keeping as well?

Austin has been run by a plague of liberal do-gooders for ages, normally just working out 'better' ways to grab and spend citizens' money. Often this is just ironically pathetic -- for instance the more than $700 million bond package for mobility which actually reduces the number of lanes available in major streets. This time, though, the city has gone completely into self-mockery mode.

You really can't make this stuff up.