Rats beware — the city is launching a $32 million plan to drive the pesky rodents out of the most invested New York neighborhoods, Mayor de Blasio announced Wednesday.
The plan includes hundreds of new high-tech rat-proof trash cans — which go for a whopping $7,000 a pop — and would force buildings in targeted neighborhoods to take out their trash between 4 and 6 a.m.
The push targets three areas with the most rat complaints — Chinatown, the lower East Side and East Village in Manhattan, Grand Concourse in the Bronx, and Bushwick and Bedford Stuyvesant in Brooklyn. It aims to reduce their rat population by 70% there.
“I don’t know any New Yorker who likes rats,” de Blasio said at a Chinatown press conference.
“They’re dangerous, they’re unhealthy,” he said. “I will admit personally to having a certain admiration for Pizza Rat, but that’s the only rat I have ever managed to like.”
The city is buying 336 big belly-style solar-powered trash cans, which keep rats out with a mailbox style opening and compact trash tossed into them. Their hefty price-tag includes a maintenance contract. Officials will also replace 1,676 wire waste baskets with steel cans.
The plan is sure to result in some unhappy supers — de Blasio is proposing legislation that would require buildings with 10 or more units in the targeted areas to put out their trash after 4 a.m., instead of the previous evening as is currently allowed.
The city also plans to pick up trash more frequently, and hike fines for illegal dumping from $1,500 to $5,000 for the first offense, rising to $20,000 for repeat offenders.
“We want to get rid of their four-star sidewalk cafes,” said Sanitation Commissioner Kathryn Garcia, explaining the rodents only need an ounce of food a day.
But opposition is expected. “I anticipate resistance,” de Blasio said. “Of course people will complain about it who have to do the work. I don’t doubt it. But if it helps us to avoid rats, if it helps us to keep things cleaner and safer . . . I will acknowledge their complaints and keep moving.”
New York has focused in the past on exterminating rats — and will continue to kill them, including by inserting dry ice into their burrows, a technique the city was just authorized to use that causes the rodents to die in their sleep.
But officials realized efforts to wipe them out were “basically like bailing out a leaky boat — you would get the water out for a while, and then it would just come back,” de Blasio said.
“How do you actually cut off the lifestyle of a New York City rat?” he said. “This plan is about going at the root cause, stopping rats from having a place to live, stopping them from having the food that they want to eat.”
The initiative will install concrete in the basements of NYCHA buildings that currently have dirt floors. The Health Department also plans to ramp up enforcement against building owners who fail to clear up rat burrows that are discovered.
The plan does not include rat repellent Mint-X trash bags — which featured into the federal investigation into de Blasio’s fundraising, after the bag company’s owner gave big bucks to de Blasio’s political non-profit and then scored a city contract. The bags got “mixed reviews” during a pilot program and are no longer being purchased, said Parks Commissioner Mitchell Silver. A spokesman later said Bronx and Brooklyn Parks offices have made additional purchases of the bags since the initial trial.
