NEW YORK (1010 WINS) — It's a city of eight million stories. Many of them involve rats.
The New York City Sanitation Department recently announced it's changing the hours in which New Yorkers can put out trash in an attempt to curb the exploding rat problem.
New York City Transit has a team that uses bait and rodenticide along the tracks to control the rat population in tunnels.
1010 WINS reporter Eileen Lehpamer met with multiple city agencies to find out who is managing proactive, routine rat extermination on the city’s streets, but it turns out a proactive approach is not in the cards.
Between Sanitation, Buildings, Parks and Rec. — all the agencies that could hypothetically be tasked with keeping the city’s rodent population under control — no public servants are actually taking the fight to the rodent menace.
A spokesman for the city Department of Transportation referred us to the city Department of Health and Mental Hygiene.
DOHMH is in charge of overseeing rat and rodent issues, but they do not proactively, routinely put out bait stations on city streets or use poison. Instead, they react to citizen complaints.
"Different entities would be involved in abatement in pedestrian plazas, parks or other public places other than Health. We do inspections and make referrals for clean-up and treatment by the owner agency,” said a DOHMH spokesperson in a statement to 1010 WINS. “If the owner fails to perform abatement, we may send a DOHMH exterminator for emergency treatment, but then we bill the owner for their time."
"We conduct thousands of proactive inspections every year in neighborhoods throughout the City of New York,” DOHMH specified.
According to public records, the Fiscal Year 2023 budget for DOHMH is almost $2.3 billion. DOHMH would not answer repeated emails asking how much of that budget is allocated for the rodent response teams.
City Councilmember Gale Brewer has written letters to the DOHMH, Parks and other agencies to find out who is in charge of exterminating in tree beds on city sidewalks, since rats often burrow into them.
Brewer tells WINS it would be great if the city could plaster the streets with bait stations, but says the "Health Department in general has very little staff, so I don't know we would ever get to that point."
Mayor Eric Adams did not immediately respond to 1010 WINS request for comment on whether his administration believes a city agency should be given more funding to do proactive, routine extermination.
Lehpamer also went on assignment with Benito Camacho of Positive Pest Management, a privately-hired exterminator, to get a first-hand look at what it takes to keep the rats at bay.
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