OLEAN
City may change code to allow goats
OLEAN — The Olean Common Council may take a closer look at the city’s code restrictions against certain farm animals and make an exception for goats.
The issue was raised during Tuesday night’s City Operations Committee meeting by City Attorney Dan DeRose, who said he was informed by Code Enforcement Officer Ed Jennings that a family in Ward 1 has been keeping a goat.
“They want permission to have a goat,” said DeRose, suggesting the aldermen consider accommodating the request and offering to draw up a resolution for the Council’s consideration.
Council President Ray Wangelin, Ward 3, said the city code bars farm animals such as cattle but specifically allows horses and chickens, in an apparent throwback to the times when residents depended on chickens as a food source and horses for transportation. Both Wangelin and Earl McElfresh, Ward 1, said they had no problem with adding goats to the list of exceptions.
On another issue, DeRose told aldermen that Hillside Wesleyan Church, at Prospect Street and Grandview in the Hillside subdivision, has requested the city clear up the title to a “paper street”—an extension of Alder Street. DeRose said parishioners recall an abandonment, but the city has no record of that and he will draft a resolution to declare the church has a superior interest in the property.
In other business, the committee sent several pieces of legislation up to the Committee of the Whole for a vote next week:
• A traffic code amendment allowing parking on the subway in the commercial, general commercial and city-center zones of North Union and West State Streets, providing the property owner paves the subway; the measure expressly bans subway parking in the three residential zones.
• Declaring the city as lead agency for the environmental review of the East Olean sewer replacement and pump station construction project.
• Transferring $85,000 from the medical insurance fund to a CHIPS capital fund to pay for scarifying Stardust Lane and Madison Avenue, with work to include several other connecting streets.
• Authorizing the public auction of three city-owned properties that received no offers during a bid procedure in 2008.
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