By Debra Cooper

Just hearing the word rats makes most of us cringe. But now we must cope daily seeing them scurry across the subway tracks, nightly rustling through plastic garbage bags and boldly scampering across our sidewalks, streets and parks.  The plague of rats has forced the closing of the original Magnolia Bakery and videos of them invading our sacrosanct locations like Fairway Market flood the internet. And it comes as no surprise to anyone living on the West Side that our neighborhood now has the highest number of rat complaints in the city.

The problem of rats goes well beyond the “ick” factor. In fact, rats have been shown to be a trigger to children suffering from asthma and have been associated with the spread of diseases such as leptospirosis, which a recent study reports is becoming more prevalent in communities like Washington Heights where rat infestations exist.  The influx of rats in a neighborhood also increases stress and tension between residents and business and landlords. And like graffiti in the seventies, rats are a sign that we are losing control of our quality of life.

Obviously, we will never have a rat free city. However history as shown with proper attention and smart strategies we can make a real difference.  In the 1970s, New York City was known to have one of the best rat-control programs in the country coordinated with a special federal government office within the Centers for Disease Control to assist urban rat programs. Then with Ronald Reagan’s severe cuts in federal aid to cities, New York cut its budget for pest control by more than 70 percent producing a corresponding increase in rat sightings and complaints.  Starting in the late 1990s, we again saw a greater emphasis and focus on rat control, and once again experienced a decline in rat infestations until recent years.

Now it is time for us again to take back our streets, parks and subways, and here is a strategy to start:

First, we must restore the city’s commitment to eliminating rats. While Mayor Bloomberg deserves credit for improving information through the city’s “Rat Portal” and training with its Rodent Academy, recent budget cuts have proven to have a negative impact. In the last three years, the City’s Pest Control budget has been reduced by more than $3 million, that’s nearly 25 percent. Not only have these cuts likely contributed to increases in rat sightings, two years ago Borough President Stringer reported that these cuts were not saving the city money, but actually costing us more because of the lost fees generated by cutting crucial personnel.

Second, every expert will tell you that the key to eliminating rats is to cut off the food source. It is said, “If you feed them, you breed them.”  While progress starts with building owners, home owners and restaurants doing a better job of having enough hard plastic rat-resistant containers with lids and properly disposing trash, there is more the city can do. Recently, the Upper West Side Shake Shack placed a solar-powered metal receptacle created by BigBelly Solar on their corner and Councilwoman Gale Brewer has announced a pilot program to place similar receptacles in Verdi Square, a known rat hangout.  The trash cans have a hinged metal door that keeps rats out, and a solar-powered compactor that reduces the need for pickups. Cities like Philadelphia, Boston and Albany are employing these trash cans citywide which not only fight rodents, but also have significant benefits in reducing traffic and environmental impact by requiring fewer pick-ups and actually saving money.  In fact, when Philadelphia adopted them across the city, it reportedly saved $900,000 in the first year.

And third, it’s time for a second Rat Summit. Eleven years ago, then Councilmember Bill Perkins, together with the Daily News and Columbia University, brought together city, state and federal officials, scientists and community activists, to discuss the extent of the city’s rat problem and the best ways to reduce the rat population. That Summit led to reducing reliance on the use of poisons and a greater emphasis on integrated pest management. Today, we need to focus on new issues related to after effects of Hurricane Sandy and impacts of new technologies and strategies. Working together, can lead to better pest management and it is a commitment we all need to make.

Debra Cooper is a state Democratic Committeewoman and a candidate for City Council on the Upper West Side.

Courtesy of DOHMH

The Upper West Side has the highest number of rat complaints in the city.

Every Upper West Side resident has a story about their worst encounter with the furry four-legged beasts that roam the neighborhood. For the lucky ones, it revolves around a brief sighting as one or two rats scurry across the street or race along the subway tracks. For the not-so-lucky, the stories are about home invasions, constant scratching sounds, garbage attacks, litters.

Joseph Bolanos has heard dozens of these stories, and has a few harrowing ones of his own. He’s a building manager on West 76th Street and the president of the West 76th Street Block Association who made headlines last year for putting up “Rat Crossing” signs in his neighborhood as a way to call attention to the major infestation in the Upper West Side.

“Originally we had an infestation on our block due to construction on one particular building, a brownstone over on West 76th Street, and what happened was that a lot of workers were eating outside of the brownstone, they were throwing their garbage in open containers, and it really created a situation that the infestation was so overwhelming that the rats were running across the sidewalk at night without fear of pedestrians,” said Bolanos.

He asked the contractor at the construction site to keep a tight lid on food and trash, a request that was initially ignored.

“I was getting reports at first that people might be getting mugged or assaulted because people were hearing screams in the middle of the night,” said Bolanos. “The screams that were being heard were actually by people who had rats at times running right over their feet.”

Fed up with the city and the building owners not addressing the problem, he posted the little signs, which look like miniature versions of the yellow diamond pedestrian signs with a hulking black rat silhouette in the middle, and the story gained local and even national attention. Bolanos said that the media focus combined with the fact that construction on that site is now nearly completion has abated the rat problem on his block, but the fight is far from over.

The increasing number of rat complaints – according to Gothamist, there were around 1,000 calls to 311 about rats from the Upper West Side between 2010 and 2012 – has made Upper West Side residents particularly jumpy. (See our Op-Ed for one local resident’s take and proposed solutions.)

John Mainieri, who also belongs to the block association, confirmed Bolanos’ account of the rat proliferation in the neighborhood. He’s lived on the block since 1995, and said that he’s definitely seen the rat problem worsen over the years.

“The big problem is that the Health Department showed up after the rat crossing signs went up and all the media attention,” said Mainieri. “Suddenly the Health Department showed up and threw down a couple of poison pellets. This was last August; they have not been back since last August.”

The Department of Health and Mental Hygiene is the city agency responsible for keeping all pests, including rats, at bay, but the issue is complicated by the fact that property owners are also responsible for keeping their property clear of rodents. (DOHMH did not answer several requests for comment for this article.) Some critics of the city’s handling of the rat issue have pointed to the lack of inter-agency cooperation as a main culprit. The Department of Sanitation, for instance, is responsible for garbage collection but not for rat abatement, and so calls to have sanitation workers pick up trash on different schedules or to install expensive “rat-proof” trash receptacles have not been addressed.

City Council Member Gale Brewer has tried to address some of her constituents’ complaints by acting as a liaison to city agencies and allocating $50,000 in city funding to install solar-powered trash compactors in Verdi Square, a known rat hang-out. Last fall, Brewer wrote to Doug Blonsky and John Herrold, the president of the Central Park Conservancy and the administrator of Riverside Park, about the increasing number of complaints from alarmed parents who spied rats gallivanting around playgrounds in both parks, including Central Park’s Wild West Playground near West 93rd Street, Safari’s Playground near West 91st Street, Mariner’s Playground near West 85th Street, Diana Ross Playground near West 81st Street and the Hippo Playground near West 91st Street in Riverside Park.

“Playgrounds on the west side of Central Park present the unique challenge of being in close proximity to a subway tunnel, which facilitates rodent mobility and breeding,” said Blonsky and Herrold in the letter. “Accordingly, we have been conducting an aggressive rat control program through the use of multiple manual traps that are set inside tamper-resistant boxes and placed in playgrounds during closed hours.”

Part of the challenge is that traps can’t possibly catch them all, and poison – especially, for instance, near a playground – is dangerous not just to rats but to dogs, cats, all wildlife and small children. Rat experts also will point out that as long as there is tastier, more appealing “human food” – our trash – accessible to rats, they won’t even bother munching on the poison pellets.

Bolanos said that trash is the biggest culprit and presents the best opportunity to make a serious dent in the rat population.

“The city puts out garbage the night before. As long as you have 12 to 13 hours where you’re putting your garbage out in plastic bags, which is nothing for a rat to bite through, you’re going to have a problem,” he said. He also noted that the increase in new high-rise buildings on the Upper West Side is contributing to higher piles of garbage on the streets at night.

“Since Sandy, it’s gotten even worse, because all the rats had to move to higher ground,” said Mainieri. “Now even in the cold weather, when you don’t normally see them, you can see them running back and forth and they’re obviously crawling up into the warm cars.”

Bolanos hopes that the city will step up its efforts, going beyond the education efforts they’ve held in the past year and trying to implement real policy changes that might temper the rat population instead of responding to complaints once a neighborhood is practically overrun.

“The Department of Health has told me, well you know it’s very difficult to get janitor and maintenance people to take the garbage out in the morning versus the night before, and I always say to them, listen, 10 years ago when people said that they were going to ban smoking, which is a vice, in New York City, everybody laughed, and now it’s 90 percent smoke free,” Bolanos said. “If we can curtail a vice, you can definitely curtail the scheduling of garbage disposal.”

But as all New Yorkers know, rats aren’t going to completely disappear any time soon.

“Any rat expert will tell you,” Bolanos said. “Wherever there are human beings, there are rats.”

With additional reporting by Joanna Fantozzi & Vanesa Vennard

Photo by Matthieu Aubry, courtesy of Flickr Creative Commons.

Gothamist reports that West 76th Street Block Association president Joseph Bolanos continued his fight against a building’s rat infestation on Wednesday by posting “Rat X-ing” signs. They are yellow and diamond shaped, and look like deer crossing signs with a picture of a rat.

Bolanos placed the signs around 52 West 76th Street, where he has dealt with rat problems for years, he told Gothamist. He wants the signs to warn pedestrians and residents about the potential danger, and to raise general awareness about the problem, which he argued is largely overlooked by city agencies and politicians.

“To be honest with you,” he said, “I have zero confidence in anyone doing anything.”

Bolanos warned that the rats crowd outside the building especially around 2 a.m. “This one lady was walking her dog there the other night and she actually stepped on one—squished it,” he recalled. “It was alarming for her and the rat.”

Caroline Bragdon, a research scientist with the Department of Health’s Division of Veterinary and Pest Control Services, came to the meeting at the community board office armed with more rat photos and information than most people would care to absorb in a lifetime. But part of the whole problem, she explained, is that people make incorrect assumptions about how to deal with rats instead of learning the facts.

Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer came by to express his solidarity—he lives among the rats too—and seriousness in combating what he said is the number one complaint his office receives, Manhattan-wide.

“The rats on my block, they don’t scurry anymore, they walk upright. They greet me and say, ‘Hello, Mr. Borough President, how are you this morning?’ ” Stringer said to knowing chuckles. “Part of what we have to do is think strategically about how to deal with this, because obviously no one wants to see rats scurrying around the community. It frightens senior citizens, it poses a danger to children, and it doesn’t give a lot of confidence in the city to see rats running rampant in the neighborhood.”

What makes the rat problem so intractable is that they love living in close proximity to people, who unwittingly provide all the food a family of the critters could ever want just in our garbage.

“Rats eat everything, and they especially enjoy things that we eat,” Bragdon said. And, confirming many people’s worst fear, “they usually live outside, but if you have food right on the other side of a non-pest-proof door, they will go inside, if you make it that easy for them.”

The recent warm winter has also exacerbated the issue, since it allowed the rats to continue breeding without the usual slowdown that comes with the extreme prolonged cold.

Along with learning that a full grown rat is mostly fur and can squeeze through any opening the size of its skull—roughly as big as a quarter—attendees at the Rat Academy learned how to prevent and exterminate the rodents, as well as how not to.

The basic lesson is that rats are attracted to food and are good at finding it. They can gnaw through almost anything. Poison, while an option, is itself problematic. For one thing, it needs to be applied strategically and by a professional. For another, some of the options that might work best, like tracking powder, are illegal and could easily also poison children, pets and other animals. The biggest hurdle, however, is getting the rats to actually eat the poison (Bragdon said it’s like “dry granola” to rats), which they won’t do if there is other, more delicious, food in the vicinity.

Simple tactics like putting the garbage out later or spraying down sidewalks to rid them of the urine paths rats follow to communicate with each other can help, Bragdon said. Plugging up holes and keeping litter off the streets is essential. Armoring all trash in lidded steel, just about the only thing that rats can’t chew through, is the best option, but more easily said than done.

On the East Side, the biggest problem area in the past has been Tramway Park, according to Council member Lappin’s office. The Parks Department has been acting to keep that area cleaner, however, which seems to be working.

“I find that if your block does the right thing, your building does the right thing, the problem is seriously abated,” Coucil Member Gale Brewer said. “The workings of the building managers really doing everything properly really gets rid of the problem.”

Some rat academy students asked if the folk remedies they’d heard, like sprinkling cayenne pepper or using mint-scented trash bags,would be effective, but Bragdon dismissed each desperate theory with a grim shake of her head.

“Remember,” she said. ‘This is the most successful mammal on Earth.”

UWS residents line up Wed. night to voice their concerns to Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer. (Photo Courtesy of @scottmstringer)

At a packed town hall meeting on the Upper West Side last night, Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer fielded questions from concerned residents of the West 90s and 100s. The community came out in full force, pressing Stringer, City Council Member Gale Brewer and a panel of officials representing various city agencies to address their complaints and fears about various neighborhood issues.

Between 100 and 150 residents attended the forum, and the line of people waiting to step up to the microphone to say their piece stretched to the back of the room for the entire two-hour meeting. Armed with literature and, sometimes, un-concealed anger, community members and self-identified local activists pressed their elected officials for answers and action.

Stringer, a contender in the Democratic primary for the 2013 mayoral race, addressed concerns ranging from construction to hydrofracking to rat infestation.

The most-discussed issue of the night was the proposed construction of a Jewish Home Lifecare center on West 97th Street. JHL, an organization that provides health care and support services for the elderly, seeks to build a new, 20-story high-rise nursing home next door to P.S. 163, an elementary school. Although the New York City Planning Commission approved the application, Community Board 7 and local activists have continued to fight against the project.

Avery Brandon, who lives near the 97th Street site and whose kindergarten-aged daughter will be attending P.S. 163 for the next several years, spoke out vehemently against the new building at the meeting.

“A huge construction project like this can have untold effects on the health of our children,” Brandon said. “With the noise levels, and the mental stress that this construction will cause, how will our children be able to learn?”

Brandon and various other residents also cited increased congestion, dust and debris and decreased access to the block for emergency responders as potential negative consequences of the project.

Later, on the issue of fracking, the focus of the conversation centered around the contentious Spectra Pipeline, a proposed natural gas pipeline intended to expand the delivery of natural gas to areas in New York and New Jersey. The project, which was approved by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission in May, is slated to run along the coast of New Jersey and cross the Hudson River into Manhattan, bringing gas from the Marcellus Shale — acquired through the process of hydraulic fracturing — to New York City homes on the West Side.

Residents at the meeting last night voiced opposition shared by many critics of the controversial method, citing in particular what they said are particularly high levels of radon and other radioactive material in Marcellus gas. They emphasized the dangers of using radon-infused gas in New York City kitchens, which tend to be small and often not well-ventilated, as well as the potential effects exposure to fracked gas could have on children in the neighborhood.

Attendees also complained of a growing rat infestation on Upper West Side streets — a problem which Council Member Brewer assured would be tackled next month in a block-by-block effort conducted by the Department of Health — and the New York Police Department’s ever-contentious Stop and Frisk policy, which NYPD representatives declined to discuss in detail last night.

West 87th Street’s rat problem is spreading. More Upper West Side residents on neighboring blocks complained to 311 in late May, according to Council Member Gale Brewer’s office.

At least a dozen calls were made to 311 from buildings on West 88th and 87th streets, between West End Avenue and Riverside Drive, which prompted inspections from the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene.

Several buildings failed those inspections. The city found rat droppings, burrows and runs during May 12 and 18 inspections at two West 87th Street buildings. One building had four 311 complaints. Another inspection, also May 12, found rat waste at a West 88th Street apartment building.

While the area is being baited, the city’s health department is holding free rodent management training sessions for building owners and staff. Training sessions are scheduled June 23 and 30 at Peter J. Sharp Residence, 223 E. 117th St., between Second and Third avenues. The sessions run from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. To attend, RSVP by phone at 646-739-4016 or email, mhunter@doe.org.