Rats are a problem all across Somerville, and despite stepped-up rodent control efforts in recent years, they’re still everywhere – and too much of our budget goes to fighting infestations, when we’ve already lost the battle.
I have a four-pronged plan to get rats under control:
- Education: A major public outreach campaign to ensure everyone knows the root causes of the rat problem and their role in combatting it.
- Services: Promptly replacing damaged trash containers, piloting rat-proof bins, and expanding curbside composting and free support for households.
- Enforcement: Cracking down on absentee landlords, owners of vacant properties, and others whose persistent negligence enables rats to thrive.
- Mitigation: Increasing City-led mitigation efforts, including proven approaches that protect wildlife and novel techniques like rat birth control.
Education
The single most important thing we must do to control rats is to change human behavior. As long as rats can find food, water and shelter, they’ll keep nesting in our neighborhoods and raising big families.
The City has already created posters, brochures, postcards and online resources, but many are outdated, hard to follow, and/or poorly translated (to the extent they’re available in non-English languages at all). We need a major campaign that reaches people where they are – at home, in their businesses, on the sidewalks, and in multiple languages. The key message: Rat Control Is On ALL Of Us.
As part of this campaign, we must update the City’s educational materials to simplify the messages; provide easy access to relevant City resources and services; and highlight the penalties for providing rat habitat – and how to report violations, recognizing that all it takes is one bad property to infest a whole block.
At the same time, we must support vulnerable residents who may not know they are harboring rats, or how to make things better. Posters and flyers are not enough; we must work with trusted community partners to reach renters in dilapidated housing, immigrants, seniors, people with disabilities, and other neighbors and connect them to the resources they need to combat rats.
Services
Trash is a major source of food for rats, and Somerville’s plastic municipal trash barrels are no match for hungry rats. We need to ensure that, as the City promises, anyone whose barrel has been gnawed through by rats can get it replaced within a week of calling 311. And in particularly rat-dense areas, like East Somerville, we must replace the municipal bins with barrels made from proven rat-resistant materials.
Municipal curbside composting is also far overdue. Organic waste is particularly attractive to rats, and many renters can’t set up backyard compost bins. The City’s new pilot program was poorly designed, reaching households scattered across Somerville. I will launch a more targeted pilot, focused on a specific neighborhood where we can measure results, with the goal of expanding curbside composting citywide if the pilot shows a real impact on rats.
Lastly, did you know the City already offers free rat mitigation support to residents, not just in public areas but on private property? It’s time to raise awareness of this valuable service, which also helps steer residents towards sustainable rat mitigation methods instead of second-generation anticoagulant rodenticides (SGARs).
Enforcement
Our public outreach campaign will encourage people to report code violations of open trash barrels and dumpsters, overgrowth and standing water – and I will make sure that the Inspectional Services Department gets out there and holds property owners and businesses accountable. ISD can start with education, a warning and information about available resources. But they must also follow up, and if the problem persists, impose fines until the problem is corrected.
The City is also long overdue in enforcing the new vacant properties ordinance, which would require all vacant properties to be registered, with fees that can help cover the cost of additional inspections.
Mitigation
Somerville has successfully pursued multiple non-SGAR approaches to control rats on public property, including novel approaches like carbon monoxide pumps, dry ice on burrows and, most recently, a joint pilot with Cambridge to test rodent hormonal birth control at the high school. I will continue and expand on those efforts.
I am also committed to fighting against SGARs, both through public education to stop its use on private property in Somerville, and by supporting efforts on Beacon Hill to pass a statewide ban.
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