Rat poison is out. Rat-proof trash bins are in, under new legislation that passed the D.C. Council on Tuesday that adds new tools to rid the city of rodents — particularly in rat-friendly, restaurant-heavy commercial corridors.
The bill, the Rodent Education and Management Yields Results Amendment Act — or REMY, named for the rat from “Ratatouille” — launches a pilot program to help business districts fund upgrades to their trash bins to keep rats out and restricts the use of certain rodenticides without special training and certification, a provision proponents say will protect pets, wildlife and children from exposure to poisons.
The legislation is part of a “multipronged approach” to tackling the growth in rat population through various strategies, said council member Christina Henderson (I-At Large), who sponsored the bill, which is expected to cost about $3 million in the next several years. The Bowser administration launched a rat birth control pilot earlier this year, and Mayor-elect Janeese Lewis George (D) — who co-led the legislation with Henderson — has pledged to hire a rat czar and to make rodent control a top quality-of-life focus in her administration.
Henderson said the problem with everyday residents turning to pesticides as a solution for rats is that they aren’t immediately effective, especially if not combined with other strategies, and rats can continue to live and procreate for several more days. She said she learned those lessons from attending D.C.’s “rat academy,” informing the new restrictions on rodenticides.
“We’ve learned a lot about rodents through this process,” she said, “and truly the thing that keeps them going more than anything else is easy access to food.”
The bill will provide grants to business improvement districts and the DC Main Streets nonprofit for rat-proof trash bins or dumpsters, along with commercial trash compactors. Those upgrades can cost thousands of dollars, deterring businesses or other entities from buying them. Gerren Price, president of the DowntownDC Business Improvement District (BID), said he was hopeful the program could go a long way toward tackling “what feels like a growing rat problem and challenge, not just downtown but really throughout the entire city.” BID staff works to clear trash daily from over 2,000 containers to keep rats at bay, he said.
“One of the lessons that we have learned and are acutely aware of is that the key to limiting rat infestations and to controlling the rat population is controlling the presence of trash and food trash out in public spaces,” Price said. “The shift to changing the trash bins to something that is more rat-proof doesn’t eliminate the need to empty them frequently but it certainly helps to prevent some of the challenges.”
Lawmakers also say the move away from rat poison will keep children safe — a council report notes over 3,000 children per year are hospitalized for exposure to poison nationwide — and will also keep rat predators safe so they can kill more rats.
In autopsy samples of 100 animals, 85 of them tested positive for rodenticides, according to a joint report from the city’s Department of Energy and the Environment and the nonprofit City Wildlife. All samples of raptors, including hawks and owls, tested positive.
“The poisoning of these birds is particularly concerning in that each hawk and owl can eat 1,000 rats a year. They are providing safe and free rat control, but we are poisoning them for doing so,” Jim Monsma, the administrative director of City Wildlife, testified to the D.C. Council in a hearing on the bill.
The legislation will also strengthen D.C. Health’s enforcement mechanisms against private properties with rat infestations, requiring a rat abatement plan to address the violations. “We have some instances where we have multifamily buildings where the landlord or building owner has not been doing what they’re supposed to do, and now you have a rodent problem that is like making its way down the rest of the block,” Henderson said. “But now we can do more enforcement for those problem places.”
The city will also launch a public education campaign to encourage residents to take their own preventive measures to avoid attracting rats while warning about the risks of poison.
“This was one of those legislations that I wanted to have done before the end of the council period because many of the provisions in there are ones that I want my agencies implementing to deal with the rats” Lewis George said.
She said she was planning to meet with Bowser administration officials to examine how the birth control pilot and other trash reduction efforts were going so she could decide whether to expand interventions that were working.
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