NEW YORK — New York City is set to expand its war on rats.
The City Council is expected to pass a package of anti-rat bills on Thursday, responding to New Yorkers’ growing frustration with the out-of-control rodent infestation in the city.
The package of four bills would set new pest management standards for all major private construction projects, require the city to establish new rat mitigation zones and mandate annual Health Department reports on the rat scourge.
The Council’s Sanitation Committee voted 9 to 0 on Wednesday to approve the so-called Rat Action Plan and move it to a Thursday vote before the rest of the Council.
“This is integral to the city’s recovery,” Councilman Erik Bottcher, the Manhattan Democrat who introduced the construction bill, said in an interview after the hearing.
“If we’re going to recover as a city, we have to make sure that New York City is a place where people want to live, work and visit,” Bottcher said. “And that means getting a handle on this rat situation.”
The vermin swell seems to be driven by a stew of factors. Dining sheds are often cited for driving rats into the open, a construction boom appears to be kicking up rats by disturbing their colonies, and warming weather may be extending rats’ breeding seasons.
A trail of trash on the city’s pavement, perhaps inflamed by a COVID-era growth in residential garbage, has supercharged the rat troubles.
In the first nine months of 2022, the city fielded almost 21,600 rat complaints, a tally 71% higher than the count reported at the same point in 2020, according to government data.
Councilman Chi Ossé, a Brooklyn Democrat and a sponsor on three of the bills, described summers in Bedford-Stuyvesant as “flattened-rat season” given the amount of rodent roadkill splayed on streets.
“They’re disgusting,” Ossé said of the rats.
Mark Levine, the Manhattan borough president and a co-sponsor of Bottcher’s bill, said the city has a “serious problem here, and it’s getting worse.”
“It’s a public health crisis,” Levine said. “It’s a quality of life crisis. It’s an equity crisis. We’ve got to address it.”
The Council committee’s hearing came nine days after Mayor Eric Adams declared an escalation in City Hall’s anti-rat effort: a planned change to the city’s trash collection rules that would dictate that trash not be placed on curbs before 8 p.m. The current start time is 4 p.m.
“I hate rats,” Adams said at a news conference detailing the shift. “We’re going to kill rats. Rats have no place in this city.”
A Rat Action Plan bill introduced by Councilman Shaun Abreu, a Manhattan Democrat, would allow the Sanitation Department to make the set-out time shift.
Abreu described the legislation as the city’s largest change to trash policy in 50 years.
His bill would also require that the Health Department set new rat mitigation zones by April. Another measure Abreu is sponsoring would mandate that buildings with repeated rodent infestation violations acquire rat-proof trash containers.
Critics have questioned whether the four-hour delay alone would make a significant dent in the rodent presence, and Abreu said there is more to do.
But he added that the overall package marks a “very important start” in the city’s effort to contain rats.
“They scare children during recess. They’re showing up in our walls. They’re showing up in our homes,” Abreu said. “It’s gotten to a point where we as a city need to take some real meaningful steps.”
