City implements wide-ranging plan to curtail rat population

Mass Innovations, From the Beacon, September 2014

Over the past few years, Somerville has developed a comprehensive program to control the city’s rodent population, with features ranging from issuing tamper-proof trash bins to the testing of a drug designed to reduce the size of rat litters.

While rats have long been present in the state’s most densely populated city, the mild winter of 2012 led to heightened awareness of the problem, according to Somerville Public Health Director Paulette Renault-Caragianes.

Somerville, she said, had an advantage in addressing the problem: detailed information collected through the city’s SomerStat performance-benchmarking system. The system has tracked rodent-related calls to the town’s 311 system as far back as 2008.

“Clearly, we are seeing more activity,” Renault-Caragianes said.

Other members of the city’s Rodent Action Team are drawn from the SomerStat staff, the Inspectional Services Department, the city’s legal department, and the Public Works Department. The chief executive of the Somerville Chamber of Commerce is also a member.

“We came up with a number of strategies that focused on using data and acknowledging that we had a problem,” Renault-Caragianes said.

Not all steps were effective. Local officials learned, for example, that poisoning rats is not easy, as they will avoid anything that doesn’t taste good to them, according to Renault-Caragianes.

“What we really needed to do, with residential trash and commercial trash, was to beef up enforcement,” she said.

A position devoted to overseeing dumpster registration and enforcing regulations was added to the Inspectional Services Department. The dumpsters have to be covered, relatively clean, emptied on a regular basis, and leak-free.

In at least one instance, Renault-Caragianes said, people who were renting a dumpster were not aware of the obligations that the rental company had to their customers.

“They didn’t have to put up with a dirty, leaking dumpster,” Renault-Caragianes said. “They could say, ‘Listen, I’m going to get a ticket for a couple of hundred dollars and get whacked every time I get a dumpster that leaks, isn’t clean, and isn’t picked up regularly.’”

The city also has developed a request-for-proposals that owners of homes with three or fewer units can use to procure services from pest-control contractors.

In addition, Somerville officials reached out to SenesTech, an Arizona-based company that is seeking approval from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency for a product designed to speed the aging process among rats, resulting in smaller litters and, ultimately, fewer rats.

“What really won us over were the statistics,” said Ali Applin, SenesTech’s marketing director, explaining that Somerville was chosen over Chicago for a pilot program.

The testing in Somerville is expected to begin early this fall. Renault-Caragianes said the hope is “we end up with exponentially less live rat births here.”

For more information, contact Paulette Renault-Caragianes at (617) 625-6600, ext. 4310.