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The
three targeted neighborhoods are in Manhattan, the Bronx and
Brooklyn.
Rats are seen as a public health threat as carriers of disease,
and as a plague on the quality of life.
Since the beginning of 2017, the New York City Health Department
has received more than 10,000 complaints of rat sightings, and
more than 15 percent of the more than 24,000 properties
inspected in Manhattan, Brooklyn and the Bronx showed "Active
Rat Signs," the mayor's office said.
“We refuse to accept rats as a normal part of living in New York
City,” Mayor Bill de Blasio said in a statement.
The plan will begin to roll out in September, and multiple city
agencies, including the Sanitation, Parks and Health
departments, will be involved.
Most of the money will be spent on improvements in public
housing apartment buildings, replacing dirt basement floors with
concrete “rat pads” and installing solar trash compactors with a
"mail-box" opening to replace the 20-year-old compactors now in
use.
Wire waste baskets on city streets will be replaced with new
steel ones. Both the new trash compactors and new trash baskets
will dramatically diminish rats’ access to food sources.
“The best way to eliminate rats is to deprive them of food,
including garbage in homes and litter on New York City streets,"
Sanitation Commissioner Kathryn Garcia said in the statement.
The city had cut its budget for rodent control programs by $1.5
million in 2010 to help reduce its overall deficit, but four
years later, with estimates of 2 million rats sharing space with
the city's population of 8 million, the Health Department
started a $3.5 million program targeting rat colonies.
(Reporting by Riham Alkousaa; Editing by Leslie Adler)
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