NYC mayor signs executive order establishing Office of Rodent Mitigation

Key takeaways

• New York City has launched the Mayor’s Office of Rodent Mitigation, the first of its kind.
• City leaders report 12 consecutive months of declining rat sightings.
• The initiative highlights growing demand for integrated pest management (IPM) and professional expertise.

New York City Mayor Eric Adams has taken the city’s anti-rat campaign a step further by signing Executive Order No. 63, officially creating the Mayor’s Office of Rodent Mitigation. The new office is designed to coordinate rodent control efforts across city agencies, community organizations and private-sector partners.

This move builds on the administration’s highly visible “War on Rats,” which already included appointing a citywide director of rodent mitigation and rolling out sanitation reforms through the Department of Sanitation’s “Trash Revolution.”

City officials say those efforts are paying off. According to the Adams administration, rat sightings across the city have declined for 12 straight months, with inspection data showing the lowest percentage of properties with active rat signs in five years.

“New Yorkers know there is nothing I dislike more than rats and that’s why we have made it our mission to significantly address this intractable problem that has plagued New Yorkers for decades,” said Mayor Adams in a news release. “With this new executive order establishing the Office of Rodent Mitigation, we are ensuring our ‘War on Rats,’ and the smart policies we put in place to coordinate across city agencies, has a permanent home. Thanks to our efforts, we have revolutionized how we approach trash in our city by containerizing 70 percent of the city’s garbage, recruited the public in our ‘War on Rats,’ and decreased rat sightings for 12 months in a row. I am proud of our legacy on a major quality-of-life, public-safety and public-health issue and am excited to see this work continue to make our city more livable for all.”

Previous efforts in New York’s ‘War on Rats’

• New York City unveils next phase of ‘War on Rats’: Adams administration announced a $877,000 investment to get rats out of 600,000 street tree beds across the five boroughs.
• NYC takes steps to combat rats