Chicago Inspector General David Glockner may have found the reason why the city has the dubious distinction of consistently showing up on Orkin’s list of the nation’s “rattiest cities.”
The Department of Streets and Sanitation’s poison-based approach to “reports of rat sightings and infestations” fails to “target sources of food and shelter” that allow the rodent population to soar, Glockner said.
Instead of throwing poison at the problem, Chicago needs a “unified strategy coordinated across city departments to cut rats off from the resources that let them thrive and multiply.”
Without a change in tactics, it will be nearly impossible to make lasting progress, and Chicagoans will “continue to face fresh crops of rats,” he said.
“While Chicago has a team that’s working hard on this issue, the particular strategy that we’re using is an approach that’s probably best described as very reactive,” Glockner told the Sun-Times.
“A more strategic approach that focuses on getting rid of the sources of food, shelter — the things that rats really need to thrive and multiply —is in the long term much more likely to be effective. If all you’re doing is essentially responding to complaints and deploying rodenticide or poison, you’re not dealing with the long-term causes of the problem, and it’s just going to recur.”
Glockner promised during his May 19 confirmation hearing to focus the inspector general’s audit work on “areas that matter most” and have the greatest potential to minimize risk, save the cash-strapped city money, and deliver city services more equitably and efficiently.
The rodent control audit fills the bill.
It advises the city’s third largest department to use a “surveying approach to collect and monitor” the data it collects on a range of factors that support rat populations, including “garbage and alley conditions, active rat signs such as burrow holes, nearby vacant lots, green space, restaurant inspections” and building code violations.
Streets and Sanitation Commissioner Cole Stallard was further advised to “establish thresholds at which rat activity or root causes warrant intervention to prevent infestation,” prioritize and coordinate city services to “deliver non-toxic interventions… before using poison as a last resort” and create a policy for the safe use of pesticides and “train employees on the circumstances that warrant the use of poison.”
Glockner said he chose rodent control as the subject of one of his earliest audits because rats are “vectors of disease, can cause bites and it is a struggle that cities across the world face.”
“You can put the poison down. But if you don’t get rid of the food sources and don’t deal with debris or brush or infrastructure that may provide harboring spots for rats, all you’re doing is briefly knocking them back — and they’re gonna come back and rebound,” he said.
Breaking down bureaucratic walls between city departments to forge a coordinated strategy “takes effort and time, but it doesn’t have to cost extra money,” Glockner said.
Stallard said he recently launched a massive public education campaign, with advertising on CTA buses and trains and digital ads at O’Hare and Midway Airports that urge Chicagoans to stop throwing trash on the street, and to pick up after their dogs.
But even after holding 200 community meetings each of the last two years to spread the word, Stallard acknowledged that there is “room for improvement” in his department’s approach to rodent control.
“We use rodenticide, which they kept referencing as poison. It is rodenticide. It is EPA-approved. But we understand the message. They’re going after the integrated pest management. We like to say we do it. Maybe not up to perfect standard. There’s definitely room for improvement,” Stallard said Tuesday.
Chicago’s $12.5 million-a-year Rodent Control Bureau has 107 employees, not all of them working directly on rodent abatement. The staff includes four administrators and employees who deliver garbage and recycling carts.
Stallard said the key to controlling Chicago’s exploding rat population is to starve the rodents by convincing people to stop littering and pressure dog owners to clean up after their dogs.
“If I throw Chicago’s finest New York steak down in an alley and someone doesn’t pick up after their dog, the rodents are… walking over that steak to get to the dog feces,” the commissioner said.
Stallard said his employees “clean up 60,000 bags of litter a year” on streets and sidewalks.
Stallard was skeptical about turning his employees into what he called the “poop police” by fining dog owners who don’t clean up after their pets.
“Try to catch somebody not picking up after their dog. It may be a challenge to enforce that,” he said.