New York mayor losing the rat race

The mayor of New York has been fined US$300 (NZ$475) by his own administration for an infestation of rats at his rental property in Brooklyn.

Eric Adams, who has made stamping out the city’s rat problem part of his agenda, attended a virtual court hearing on Wednesday to contest the fine, imposed after city health inspectors found his property in the BedfordStuyvesant neighbourhood overrun with rodents.

Adams insisted that he was a rat expert.

He told the hearing officer, technically his employee, about his efforts in office to beat the pests that have bedevilled the city since its founding and grown worse in the pandemic.

The mayor said that as landlord he had spent US$7000 fighting rats in his property, installing the cutting-edge trap he showcased last year when he was Brooklyn borough president.

The Italian traps lure the rodents into a chamber with a smorgasbord of baits before they fall into a compartment filled with an alcohol-based solution that knocks them out and drowns them. Adams complained that city laws were ‘‘designed to penalise homeowners for failing to take steps to prevent and control rodents’’.

The New York Times reported that he said: ‘‘I took those steps and will continue to do so.’’ The health inspectors disagreed. After issuing the fine in May, they noted they had found ‘‘fresh rat droppings’’ at the property. Only days earlier, Adams’s administration said it was seeking a ‘‘director of rodent migration’’ – dubbed the rat tsar – to tame the city’s infestation problem.

An advertisement for the post says: ‘‘Do you have what it takes to do the impossible? A virulent vehemence for vermin? . . . The drive, determination and killer instinct needed to fight the real enemy – New York City’s relentless rat population?’’

The problem is legendary but successive administrations have failed. Adams’s predecessor, Bill de Blasio, spent tens of millions of dollars trying to combat the rats, including a dry ice programme to suffocate the pests in their burrows. Rat sightings soared during the pandemic, however, as garbage collection was neglected when the sanitation budget was slashed. The mass workforce exodus and unpopular vaccine mandates imposed by de Blasio resulted in hundreds of sanitation staff quitting their jobs. Piles of rubbish grew and the rats thrived.