New York City Mayor Eric Adams ruffled plenty of feathers in the state Democratic Party when he had the nerve to mention that the crime rates were out of control in his city during the closing days of the midterm elections. But he vowed to work with the Governor and the City Council to get more guns and criminals off the streets. He also called out the need for more affordable housing and homeless shelters, as well as ending the exodus of residents from the city. So now that the election is over, what concrete actions does he have in mind? He’s going to start “killing some rats.” And that’s not a euphemism. He is once again talking about the eternal plague of rodents that have infested Gotham for generations, defying all efforts to drive them out of town. It would certainly be a popular plan if it actually worked, but is this really New York’s top priority? (Daily Caller)

New York City Mayor Eric Adams signed legislation Thursday to curb the city’s rat population.

“I hate rats,” Adams said. “And we are going to kill some rats.”

“We’re making clear that rats don’t run our city. New Yorkers do,” he added.

The four bills Adams signed will create rat mitigation zones, codify garbage set out times, and reduce rats in construction areas and other buildings prone to rodent infestations, Adams said.

They even came up with a fancy logo for the plan.

WATCH OUT, RATS!@NYCMayor signed a new set of bills that will create rat mitigation zones and put into law new trash set out times to reduce the amount of time bags sit out on city curbs.

We're winning this war on rats. pic.twitter.com/wDOj4aKxpT

— NYC Mayor's Office (@NYCMayorsOffice) November 18, 2022

We’ve seen this game played so many times in the past that few people are likely to believe that the money being dumped into this program will do anything. Bill de Blasio tried it in 2017. Back in 2011, Michael Bloomberg took a different approach by trying to claim that the city didn’t actually have a rat problem. (He later restarted the rodent eradication program.) Twenty-five years ago, Rudy Giuliani declared a war on rats. Do you know who came out victorious in all of those wars? Pizza Rat did.

During the brief, miserable time that I had to live in the city back in the early nineties, you didn’t have to walk more than a block or two at any hour of the day to see a rat. Or, more likely, a group of rats. They’ve been there pretty much as long as people have inhabited the island. And once the subways were constructed, the rats seemed to hit the mother load. The tunnels are the perfect environment for them.

While it may sound counterintuitive, the rat problem in New York City actually got worse during the COVID lockdowns. The reason was that the city allowed all of the restaurants to establish outdoor dining on the sidewalks. That inevitably led to more food-trash outside of the buildings and the rats immediately moved to take advantage of it.

The surge in homelessness isn’t helping either. All of the homeless encampments generate tons of trash and they aren’t policed for cleanliness very well. (To put it mildly.) That’s an open invitation to the rat population. While you will never be able to rid the city of rats entirely, the solution is as obvious as it is seemingly impossible to achieve. If you don’t want rats hanging around, you have to eliminate their food source. It’s the only thing that will work. But that would mean completely changing the city’s trash disposal and pickup system, clearing out the homeless encampments entirely, and ending all outdoor dining, including food trucks and picnics in the park, as well as in the subways.

And that’s simply never going to happen. People have to eat and they frequently eat on the go. You’d have better luck simply declaring a ban on people in the city. If you could manage that, the rats would be almost entirely gone in under a month. (Hrmmm… maybe we should consider… Nah. They’d never agree.)

I’m afraid the rats are here to stay, but the Mayor obviously has to make a few headlines and pretend that he’s doing something about it. In the meantime, here’s a blast from the past, just so the Mayor and our readers can keep some perspective.