Neighborhood garden leads to flap in Winfield

Some Winfield officials say the village’s approach to a complaint over a supposedly smelly garden stinks.

Trustee Tony Reyes led a move to kill a proposed ordinance change that would have imposed what he called “unenforceable” and “annoying” restrictions on neighborhood gardens last week.

If approved, the ordinance would have added neighborhood gardens as an explicit allowable use of vacant lots in residential zones.

But doing so also would create bureaucratic hoops residents would have to go through just to continue doing what the village has allowed for decades, Reyes said.

“The village was trying to write a code to do something good but the things they restricted were unenforceable and created an annoying code for the village to follow,” he said.

The proposal failed with Reyes, Tim Allen and Jim Hughes voting against it. Jay Olson and Erik Spande supported it, with Jack Bajor abstaining.

In August, a neighbor complained about several aspects of a large vegetable garden on a vacant lot on the 500 block of Robbins Street, including the alleged stench. The owner of the lot, Sok Tan, who lives in a home adjacent the lot, and his neighbors had converted about 20 percent of the 7,500-square-foot site into a neighborhood garden after his family no longer had much use for it.

But the neighbor’s complaint brought out code enforcement officials.

Economic Development Coordinator Peter Krumins ruled the garden was illegal because of a provision in the zoning code that requires a special-use permit for “growing of crops or nursery stock in the open” in a residential zone.

The new ordinance meant to explicitly allow the gardens but with some caveats, including limits on how much of a vacant lot can be used for gardening and signage and parking restrictions.

But the provision in the ordinance that drew most of Reyes’ ire required that garden debris be regularly cleaned, composted or removed from the site. It stated that “compost cannot create an odor detectable at the property line.”

“You would need a lawyer to understand the code,” Reyes said. “You’d need an environmental engineer to find how to mitigate odor and dust and what level was acceptable. Then a surveyor to find your lot line. This code is completely unnecessary, unenforceable and ridiculous.”

Spande said all trustees agreed the Tan family should not be punished and they were not doing anything wrong. However, he said the village still must address the ordinance instead of just ignoring it, especially when the concern is raised by a resident’s complaint.

“We need to do our best to enforce (codes) assuming we have cause to do that and follow due process,” he said. “Just ignoring the problem or looking the other way, it’s not appropriate. If people have ideas about how to approach this in another way, I’ll be fully supportive.”

Trustee Hughes said the reaction to a single complaint was too much but that he will continue to seek ways to amend the existing ordinance.

“It’s not good right now where it is,” he said. “We’re going to have to take a look at amending the ordinance and taking the teeth out of if and find something to agree on and move forward.”