Blue Hill, ME is the latest town to pass a local food and self-governance ordinance

Blue Hill, Maine, voted overwhelmingly to pass a Local Food and Community Self-Governance Ordinance at their Saturday town meeting on April 2. Discussion of the ordinance, which allows communities to establish their own rules governing sale and production of farm products, was lively, according to AfD co-chair and Blue Hill resident Bonnie Preston. You can read a model of the ordinance here.

Local food activists will be meeting soon to discuss how best to move forward to get this ordinance passed in other towns around the state. Two more towns are going to be voting in June, and several more are interested in adding it to their warrants for next year. Brooksville, which voted the ordinance down after a committee recommended a no-vote, may take the ordinance up again in May.

Bonnie also reports that people from around the country are interested in what the ordinance does to protect local farming and farm-to-consumer sales--the
day the Local Food, Local Rules web site went up, there were 522 hits on the link to the sample ordinance. Everybody eats!

The Bangor Daily News covered the vote here.