A local food policy committee defined Wednesday a list of priority health goals for Madison in 2013, including increasing opportunities for residents to garden on public lands.
Madison’s Local Food Policy Council discussed two ordinances that would make healthy food more accessible by allowing residents to plant on terraces and city-owned land.
The first ordinance would create an application system in which residents would be able to obtain “edible landscaping” permits to garden on public land.
Committee member Topf Wells said multi-year contracts would be better suited for the project than annual permits.
“Since a lot of the species that are contemplated here are perennial, I think it would make more sense to go with a permit period, perhaps not indefinitely, but longer than one year,” Wells said.
Members also discussed how the city would make sure public planting areas were properly maintained, so as not to obstruct the community and bother neighbors.
“Some of the plants that could be put in … could expand and take on more territory, so one of the responsibilities of the growers or ‘permitees,’ might be to confine the vegetation,” Wells said.
The committee agreed to prohibit participants from planting “invasive species,” and decided complaint-based enforcement would be the best way to monitor public gardens.
The second ordinance would allow gardening on terraces, city-owned land extending from the curb to the sidewalk, and would not require a permit.
The FPC also discussed a current proposal to create an expansive public market as a priority to increase traffic within the local food network.
Sandy Welander, a Drumlin community farm cooperative farmer, spoke to committee members about city government’s imperative role in bringing a year-round public market to Madison.
“I think that we need a public market that’s open six, seven days a week that can compete for sales with places like Super Wal-Mart and Woodman’s,” Welander said. “The challenge in organizing something like that is that farmers and vendors aren’t all necessarily able to staff a public market each [on their own].”
The ordinances will go through several city committees before coming back to the FPC for final review.
The committee will then send final recommendations to the city Council for approval, which Food and Alcohol Policy Coordinator Mark Woulf said could happen as early as April.
