Chicken Lovers’ Feathers Ruffled : Protesters Say Rule Is Half-Baked

Chickens don’t usually rally much public support, but in Sunset Beach on Monday, 100 people demonstrated along Pacific Coast Highway to urge Orange County supervisors to save a 6-foot mechanized chicken that adjoins a local restaurant.

The problem started about two weeks ago when Sanford and Linda Simmons, owners of the Stuf’d Chicken Restaurant in Sunset Beach, placed the oversize chicken in front of their 2-year-old restaurant.

“We thought it would be the unofficial Sunset Beach greeter,” 41-year-old Sanford Simmons said. But within days, Caltrans officials told the Simmonses to move it out because it was blocking the sidewalk, Sanford Simmons said.

The Simmonses moved the chicken to the side of the restaurant, where it is currently perched atop a 4-foot-high entrance sign. But within days, Simmons said, inspectors from the county Environmental Management Agency said the chicken had to go.

Gary Boettcher, chief of enforcement for the agency, said portable advertising signs are illegal in the unincorporated parts of the county.

Simmons said that because he worries about nocturnal chicken thieves, he likes to bring the bird inside at night.

Boettcher said that county enforcement inspectors have visited the Simmonses several times since November about other advertising violations, but of the chicken, he said, “it’s getting out of proportion.”

Customers at the Stuf’d Chicken, however, disagree.

Sanford Simmons said more than 1,000 people had signed a petition “to save our chicken.”

Shirley Saltman, a Seal Beach real estate agent and petition signer, said she and her husband eat regularly at the small restaurant and see nothing wrong with the chicken. “It is adorable. I don’t see anything offensive about it at all.”

Ida D. Spiegel, 93, felt so strongly about the large bird that she joined in the rally. “That chicken is a wonderful thing,” she said, asking, “How can they even think of getting rid of it?”

Spiegel, of Brookline, Mass., lives with her daughter in Sunset Beach five months of the year. They eat at the restaurant every week, she said.

The Simmonses said that other signs in the area are more objectionable than their chicken.

Boettcher agreed but said that only signs predating a 1983 land-use plan are exempt from the regulation. The 2-week-old chicken, he said, does not qualify.

Continued violation of the county ordinance could ultimately result in a fine of up to $500 fine and six months in jail, Boettcher said, “but the last thing we want to do is issue a citation.”

“We’re taking this very seriously,” Linda Simmons said, “but I don’t know what the odds of saving the chicken are.”

The restaurant has two ways to save the mechanical bird, Boettcher said. The owners can make the chicken a permanent fixture, which would require building approval from the local coastal review board and the county Planning Commission, or the Sunset Beach land-use plan could be amended to allow portable signs. This would require California Coastal Commission approval, he said.

Sanford Simmons said the problems stem from his plan to hire teen-agers to wear the chicken suit and wave at passers-by. Despite raising the salary to $4 an hour and rest breaks every 15 minutes, no one wanted the job, he said.

According to Linda Simmons, employment applications still come in stating, “I’ll do anything but be the chicken.”

As a carload of beach-goers drove by yelling, “Hail to the chicken,” Sanford Simmons said of the mechanical bird: “We really thought we had the solution.”