Rodent Issues Special Committee

All right, good evening, everyone. I'm Jake Wilson, he, him pronouns, your counselor at large and chair of the Rodent Issues Special Committee. We are meeting tonight via remote participation. It's 6 o'clock on the dot. I'd like to call to order this meeting. First, I need to read you all some language that lets us do this here. Pursuant to Chapter 2 of the Acts of 2025, this meeting of a City Council Committee will be conducted via remote participation. We will post an audio video recording. Audio recording, transcript, or other comprehensive record of these proceedings as soon as possible after the meeting on the City of Somerville website and local cable access government channels. Clerk, could you please call the roll to establish quorum?

This is roll call. Burnley, present, Councilor McLaughlin, here, Councilor Wilson, present, the three Councilors present, we have

All right, this is our final meeting here of the year of the Rodent Issues Special Committee. We have a relatively short four-item agenda before us here. We're going to go ahead and take up, first of all, let's approve those committee meeting minutes. We'll take up ID number 25-0871, approval of minutes of the Roten Issues Special Committee meeting of April 30th, 2025. On the minutes, any discussion? I'm sure this is all fresh in your minds, right? Scene, no discussion. Clerk, please call the roll on approval of those minutes.

Not acceptance of item 125-0871. McLaughlin?

Yes.

Councilor Burnley?

Aye.

Councilor Wilson?

Yes.

Those are approved.

All right, now I'm going to take up the remaining agenda items together so that we can get a presentation that covers all of these things without trying to break it into pieces. So that's ID number 25-0243 that the Director of Communications and Community Engagement update this Council on efforts to educate the public about preventing conditions conducive to growth of the rodent population. 25-0244, that the Director of Inspectional Services update this Council on efforts around enforcement of rodent-related ordinances, including the number of complaints, inspections, warnings... and fines issued for vegetation and trash violations. Item number 25-0245, that the environmental health manager update this council on rodent activity data and rodent mitigation efforts, including any novel approaches being are under consideration or being utilized. And ID number 25-1687, that the Director of Inspectional Services update this council on the Rodent Hormonal Birth Control Program being jointly piloted with the City of Cambridge. All right, we have... I'm going to get titles wrong.

I can't call you both the rat czars. We have... What is your title these days? What are we calling you?

Environmental Health Coordinator.

I was going to guess Environmental Health Coordinator. We also have, what are we calling Colin Ziegler these days?

The Environmental Health Manager.

Environmental Health Manager. Bingo. Never the rat czars, but you'll always be the rat czars to us. Please, if the clerk doesn't mind sharing, giving screen sharing capabilities here. To our environmental health coordinator.

It says my sharing is disabled at the moment. Does it let you request at all? A wrinkle.

You should be able to now.

Perfect. All right. Can everyone see my screen?

We can. Please take it away.

Awesome. Thank you, Mr. Chair. As stated, my name is Alicia Priva. I'm the Environmental Health Coordinator with the Inspectional Services Department. I'm going to go over all the points from the agenda in my presentation. I apologize though I flipped the order of the agenda items so we're going to talk about the fertility control study first. So we do have some initial data. We are still collecting a bunch of data and we have started our analysis phase right now. So there's not really any conclusive information we can make from the numbers we have. But right now, based off of the information that we have collected at Somerville High School, where we are currently finishing up baiting, With the fertility control product, we can determine that there has been high activity, a lot of consumption of the bait.

So as you can see from this graph, we start in August in 2024. This was a pre-bait period where we baited the traps with peanut butter and this was just to see If the boxes where they were set were going to get any activity at all and also kind of attract the rodents into the box in the first place before we put the evolved product in there. And then once we started putting the Evolve product in in September, we started seeing an increase in activity. These bars, as you can see at the top, doesn't show number of rats themselves, it shows number of rat events. That's just how many times a rat has gone into the box. So it could be different rats, it could be the same rat going into the box over and over again. Likely it is

The same rat going into the box many times because when I went and baited the traps, I would see the regulars in there every once in a while. But there was pretty consistent bait consumption of this product, which is already an improvement based on the last product we used, the Contrapest, because that one wasn't as appetizing to the rodents. We are going to start looking more at other data such as smart box data or 311 complaint data to also compare these numbers too so that we can have more context for How this product is affecting the overall population in these testing spots. Right now, we are still baiting residences in Lincoln Park. With the Evolve, it's going about once or twice a week. It's been going pretty well over there.

Still high consumption rates over there from what I've seen. But yes, time will tell. And that's all I have for the fertility control studies. Are there any questions about that?

Oh, yeah. And colleagues, we did decide before the meeting started that just if you have questions, put a hand up. We'll call on you as we go through the presentation. No need to save them to the end. I'll just say, love hearing about RAT events.

Awesome. All right. So now we'll go into the 311 data and reporting in our current efforts right now. So 311 data for this year. We have been seeing, continue to see a steady decrease in 3-1-1 complaints. Best data is as of 11-20, so isn't the whole year of 2025, but it's pretty much most of the year. We continue to see regular patterns with high complaints in the warmer months and less complaints in the winter months just due to the seasonality. but also just as we know and I'll continue to reiterate that 311 complaints still have some error to them just based off of um how much people there's like a tolerance people have for rodents and how much they'll send complaints and then also at

whether they're in town or not, those kinds of things affect our 311 numbers. So just want to practice this information with that. But kind of to give more context, with the 311 complaint data. We have been working with Somerstadt a little bit more to map out these complaints and provide that additional context so we can understand the numbers better. I apologize, this map is a little blurry. I tried to take a screenshot of it, but... This is some information we've gathered based off of the block census data and 311 complaints. So this is a map of the percent of unique rodent-related callers. throughout Somerville. So it's interesting to see. So it looks like most of Somerville, the amount of callers are unique in submitting 311 requests about rodents.

and then this one is similarly the 311 based off of census block data and all that. This is the percentage of 311 requests that are rodent related so of 3-1-1 calls these are the ones that are related to rodents and then we're seeing some more differences in this in these census block cells so we're seeing darker numbers being the 3-1-1 and so on. How much more we need to be out there, how we need to distribute our interventions and things like that. All right, and then to go into the rodent assistance program because that's part of our 311 data this year.

These are the number of unique properties visited with the rodent assistance program. This year we had 834 unique properties visited, which is higher than both 2024 and 2023, which is really great. It really shows how much work that the inspectors, Kim and Andy, are going out to all these properties. I think we've also kind of established more into our system when we are doing outreach efforts we are trying to get more properties in a certain block on the road assistance program at the same time so that it just is more effective we're treating multiple properties in an area at a time because as we know rats don't know property boundaries and things like that so I think that has helped those areas that are

These are the total visits. Context, the Roan Assistance Program. We had expanded it to four visits instead of three visits in 2024. So it that's why we're seeing the bump here and then with four visits for all those 800 properties these are the total number of visits in 2025. Alright, and those are the 311 related data information. Any questions about that?

I've got a question. I'll save it for a second in case colleagues want to jump in. All right, I'll just ask it. What's our sense? I know you're not going to... He may not feel comfortable speculating without data, but what's our sense about how much of this is... Due to any sort of decrease in the incidence of rodent activity versus how much is, I don't want to say fatigue, resignation, acceptance of the situation with the decrease in three-on-one call volume.

I think that's a great question. I mean, I think it also depends on who you ask. Sometimes I feel like in certain areas where we get called a lot more and The summertime as composed to other areas as they, you know, if we solve a problem in one area, the rats tend to move somewhere else close by. So sometimes it's just kind of, it feels like you're playing chase, but I would say I think based off of the way we're collecting the data, we're also, and I'll get to this a little bit later on too, but we're collecting more data with the rodent assistance program and tracking feeding rates and number of burrows we're treating and that kind of stuff. And that helps us also track whether there's still activity in a certain area and whether it's dying down.

and then also with the other context of the 311 complaints and stuff like that so um Yeah, I would say it's hard to completely know without all the data, but I would say I think when we look at those things, it kind of helps us know what places are getting the appropriate treatments and not.

Yeah, I appreciate that. Other question I'll ask just because it's going to come up all the time. Eskars. Obviously, as of last year, we said we're not using those on public land. The question we get then is about private land. The vendors that we employ for our residential pest management, they're not deploying escars on private property, are they?

Correct. So we use our T-RAD, the vitamin D-based rodenticide. So those aren't, they're still rodenticide, but they're not an eschar. They're not classified as an eschar.

Thank you for getting that out there. It's a question that we get all the time. I've told people that it helps having that out there in the public record that our contractors are also not using this privately. That's all I had. I don't see anything from colleagues, so I'll let you roll on.

Awesome. All right. Let's go into rodent-related violation data. So this data, I haven't updated with summer stat, but hopefully we're trying to make it more available for everyone to see publicly, but 2025, this year, we have seen an increase in residential trash, basically all violation types except for vegetation overgrowth. and I'll show the comparison to last year too but um Residential trash remains to be the highest rodent-related violation that we issue. Commercial trash and vegetation overgrowth, similarly. are follow second and third behind. And then rental control violations. This includes having boroughs on the property,

If we see excessive droppings and things like that on the property as well, it could lead to a rodent control violation. So these maps, I overlaid violation data with a heat map of 311 complaints from 2025. So we can see the commercial trash violations and the residential trash violations and how they're distributed throughout the city in relation to the 311 complaints. So again, lots of residential trash violations. and then we are seeing more commercial trash relations in the areas where we would see More commercial activities at Union Square, Davis, along Broadway here in East Somerville. We have restaurants over there. So those little clusters. and then rodent control violations and vegetation overgrowth. So we do see a more cluster in East Somerville.

It's just a lot more older homes. They tend to have more gardens and stuff as compared to We did see a decrease of this number compared to last year, which might be a good sign that people are just being more aware of this and taking care of it. you know landscaping and things like that and then this is the comparison between this year 2025 and last year 2024. So and then this data is only from November, so we've already surpassed last year's numbers in most of these categories.

I got a question on this one. So the road control violations, right? That's people getting fined for like having burrows, having an infestation, you know, that's out visible to the public. Someone reports that they're given a fine for that.

Yes, yes, exactly.

I'll ask a policy question here. I've heard from some folks about who've tried to do pollinator gardens or the sort of at the end of the growing season, letting things kind of lie there. Not raking, letting leaves, and they've gotten visits. They've gotten cited for vegetation overgrowth. I guess maybe this is one for the folks out there in ISD actually issuing those, but I'm curious about how we deal with that tension between our values around Pollinator Gardens, and that sort of thing, and wanting to keep a habitat that's not conducive to rats.

Right. So that's a great question. So part of the vegetation overgrowth violation One aspect is that when the vegetation overgrows so much to where it's blocking public way, that would lead to overgrowth violations. When it comes to the pollinator gardens, if it's within the space in the confines of the property boundary, it's not blocking public way or anything, it would not... automatically lead to a violation. where it can lead to a violation if there is evidence of burrows underneath overgrown vegetation on the property and it's visible from a public way. We could say that's conducive conditions, that's harborage. If there's a lot of yard waste that's just piled up and

There's been a 311 complaint about like rodents in the area. We've seen droppings on or near the property. We kind of put two and two together to think that they're kind of related to each other. And that's kind of how the inspectors make those determinations. Colin, I don't know if you want to add anything to that, if there's any other aspects that I'm missing.

No, I think you summarized it pretty well, Alicia. I would say our inspectors do a good job interpreting situations where it's like light overgrowth or vegetation or something that would be excessive or blocking public way. I've been in discussions with them over the past couple of years about those interpretations and I feel as though we're on the same page at this point.

All right. Thanks for that. One final question. What happens if it's a rodent control violation on public property?

Great question. So any rodents, like, say, see a burrow in the parks or something like that should be reported to 311. so that it can get routed to Public Works. That way we have it documented and we have basically a paper trail of this row that has been cited and it's leading to the pest control

Are we working on that, Warren, at City Hall?

Yes, so I totally understand what you're talking about. So if there are boroughs in City Hall, those should be submitted by whoever the designated borough Admin person for that building is. Typically, that's what we'd prefer. So a 311 complaint needs to be submitted so it could get to DPW buildings.

But if the public submits it, that's good enough, right? We don't need to wait for the building admin to, right?

Correct.

Yes, yes. Thank you. Thank you. Just want to make sure for the public, like, we're on that. We're working on the situation at City Hall that got a lot of attention last week. Okay. Thank you. I'll let you roll on.

All right, and I believe I will hand this over to Colin now.

Thanks, Alicia. I really appreciate that. So as many of you know, the city operates under an integrated pest management program, which is special in a way. because often IPMs are deployed for individual properties or individual pest control programs that focus on that space particularly and the operations internally. So we've formatted an IPM for the city to guide internal policy and procedure across departments and develop projects together and add a level of accountability to those project managers that are Tangentially or directly related to pest control in the city, particularly rats. So this is just a quick update on 2026. We do an update of this every two to three years depending on how projects are progressing. or if new ideas start funneling through as plausible or something that we are interested in exploring.

So, Alicia, you can go ahead and forward. So it's broken up into residential, public, and commercial with subcategories of education, enforcement, and abatement. just so everyone is aware of that format but we wanted to highlight some of the key aspects and updates of projects that we're planning on adding to the IPM working on through 2026 into 2027 and deploying and seeing if they work and exploring new projects and things that the city would like to implement in the future. The first of which is an expansion of the annual comms plan that's been in place that's sort of a mainstay. But we do have a new exciting one. We're exploring the use of yard signs and we're currently designing those. Alicia is doing an excellent job doing that.

along with the Trifold Mailer with the intention to notify the general public and neighbors that some properties are taking those extra steps going that extra mile to reduce road activity on their property. It's the added level of peer pressure and collaboration that we're looking for in our communities. And in many cases, we've seen successful situations where folks band together, they pressure each other, they work together and ultimately reduce rats in their neighborhoods. Another aspect of residential education would be to continue to engage with landlords, finding new novel ways to work with them, whether they live in the house or they manage the property from a building in Boston we want to ensure that we're opening those lines of communication figuring out new ways to educate them and answering their questions these people might not know everything or be totally aware of how to do proper pest control

but we're there to inform them and instruct so that's a big project we'll be working on and then we're going to be exploring resources for you know Getting folks connected with resources associated with energy efficiency work or pest control. We have read a couple of different studies related to reductions in pest control in and around properties. Those that have done retrofitting for energy efficiency work and those who haven't. And it's shown that A lot of the energy efficiency work that can be done on properties. including insulation, patching up holes, new windows, those types of things can help reduce activity in and around a property. This would mainly pertain to mice at the physical building.

And then rats can be associated if you're doing work like trenching or replacing soft soils with, you know, permeable surface and things like that. Pretty exciting for some of the stuff that we've been looking into so far. Yeah, we'll move into residential abatement. So the main points of residential abatement that the city operates under is the residential rodent control program. The past year or so, we've been logging all of our visits into Citizen Serve, including the bait consumption data. That's interesting in two ways. The first of which is that the bait boxes are, it's noted as to where they're placed. So we're going to get an idea of where bait boxes could be most effective on various properties, like is it most effective near a fence line? Is it most effective near the shed?

is most effective near the actual building itself, as well as the consumption rates, which is going to be helpful for us to understand the amount of activity on a property, but also the Palatability of various baits. Right now we're operating with T-Rad, but there's always going to be a new bait to try, something that might be more effective. and doesn't have us resorting back to using more dangerous poisons associated with secondary poisonings like Ascar. that's been an exciting development we're going to continue refining that improving that and then pushing out those that information to the residents. One of the first and most common complaints we get with the program is that there isn't that and many more. Thank you.

They click complete and then that report can get filed to them directly. And then in that report, it's going to have all of the visitation information as well as the recommendations from the inspector and the licensed pest control technician. That is critically important. As you know, we had over 800 properties participate last year or this year, I should say. and to get them that type of information would be critical to the long-term reduction in rodents that we want to see. So that's very exciting. And then, as you all know, we helped advise on the pilot program for the compost. We're going to be monitoring that very closely with participating properties and look at rodent.

Report data, as well as if anyone's participating in the residential program at the information as to whether or not there are reductions that we're seeing as a result of waste diversion from our bins into the compost. Love it.

One question for you. Go ahead. Have you bumped up against a situation where there are any modules that you know about for CitizenServe that we don't currently have that you think would be helpful?

Right now, the biggest one that is related to rodent control is making the application online in some capacity where a resident will log the request directly to us. that is going to have to be generated as a type of license that we're going to be working out directly with CitizenServe. We've done a formatting of it, like a workflow but how that's actually going to be implemented we're going to be working on in the coming months and hoping to launch early spring 2026. All right, thanks for that.

All right, I'm going to hand the comp to Vice Chair McLaughlin, who's going to be taking over while I duck into another meeting. I will see you all back here shortly.

Sounds good. I am here. Please proceed. Thank you, Councilor. Let's move on to commercial education and enforcement. The biggest thing that we would like to do is... Implement a level of education and empowerment to our businesses and provide them the information that they need to reduce rodents on their own property. you know there's only so much we can do with smart boxes and monitoring and you know calling them every every once in a while when we see an uptick but what we want to do is as they're applying for their licenses we want to give them the information that they need To move forward. Currently, in collaboration with Cambridge, we're looking at our best practices guides for both residential spaces and that sort of permeates into

commercial spaces as well but we're working closely with them and developing a new guide the one on our website currently is a little outdated there are new best practices there's new information there are better ways to communicate what we're looking for and we're hoping to do that we don't have a set timeline on that this is a collaboration it's sort of a shared effort so we'll see how that goes but we're looking forward to working with our with our our partners in Cambridge Those will be for building demolition, vacancy, dumpster food, outdoor seating, and other permits and licenses where we see it's appropriate. Currently, reviews for pest control do occur for all building and demolition permits. So that's very exciting. Next. Public abatement. We're still working on big belly trash receptacle replacements, working closely with our partners at DPW.

Those are... Flying out the door and going in some locations that have been hit very hard by having the open decorative barrels for how many years. So we're excited to see more and more of those big value sites. Take a picture by them, a quick selfie to send to my family. They're getting kind of tired of it. But anyway, very exciting. Also, we're looking to expand Smart Boxes to schools. We've written up a scope of work for our DPW team to start implementing into their pest control contracts to include smart boxes for monitoring at external sites at all of the schools. This currently looks like two to three boxes at each school, usually near a dumpster or areas where we would get high reports. Smart boxes will be monitoring both road Rat activity as well as mice, which is of concern in the schools.

And then we'll continue to use dry ice and CO, carbon monoxide. Which leads me to the next most exciting thing. Alicia has been working on pulling together what it would take for us to buy a carbon monoxide machine for the city and its use. And we're working on that process currently. and we're very excited to have one in our hands in the near future using participatory budgeting funding, which we're very grateful for. What that looks like is that we should be able to utilize the CO machine in most public spaces that are further away from a building. And as we figure out how to use it online, More efficiently, effectively and take some information from our friends over at Harvard who are using this on their campus. How can we use these near buildings? What is the evacuation process? But all of that we'll figure out in the future.

We're hoping to use the CO machine in our parks or areas further away from buildings that boroughs are identified. So, very exciting. These are two pie-in-the-sky ideas, but I want to include them in the IPM because they are very important to long-term mitigation. We've seen some success stories in in-ground mitigation. Trash Receptacles, as well as the installation of public dumpsters or drop-off locations for compost recycling and trash. We see that the consolidation of these types of areas as well as having them more secured than sort of residential toters could be an effective strategy moving forward. But there's a lot of technical and engineering questions that still need to be answered. but we want to get the ball rolling and have those discussions now so just two quick points for our you know our big term goals so

And then monitoring. This is pretty straightforward. We continue to try to work on programs where we can monitor data and information, including diseases, infections, eschar poisonings, those types of things. and then we've also been in some meetings and presentations related to citywide or larger scale monitoring programs beyond smart boxes. This would include, you know, 4G gateways being installed throughout the city to monitor boxes that are connected to them. and track road activity in a more long-term fashion. Again, very, very long-term. We're exploring these things and looking at if they can be deployed. All of it will be important data and information for the future I believe that's it, right Alicia?

Yes, that is it Do we have any questions from the committee? I don't see any. Do you have any more information for us, Colin?

Yeah, I will leave with this. Now is the time. Start cleaning up yards, clearing clutter. Getting ready for that spring breeding cycle, the foraging cycle. Now is the time. If you see burrows, treat them. If your yard has extra junk in it or if there's yard waste, that. Maybe isn't related to like a pollinator garden or anything like that. Now is the time. Winter, fall. It's a great, great time to track rats, find their hiding places and address those before spring rolls around. That's it for me, Alicia. Anything else?

Nope. Well, thank you both for the presentation. I don't have any questions, but I feel very satisfied knowing that people are out there working on this. Just as an anecdote, I of course used your services as well I haven't seen any rats in my backyard for quite a while so let's hope that the rest of the neighborhood feels that way one last call for questions or comments See none. I'd like to move to adjourn. Thank you very much, everyone.

And on and Councilor McLaughlin, excuse me if I missed this. We are marking every item work completed.

This is a monthly, this is a regular update, correct?

Just beware, this is the last meeting before the end of the year.

It's market work complete then.

Okay, you're marking all items were completed and on adjournment, Councilor Burnley? On adjournment, Councilor Burnley? Aye. McLaughlin.

Yes.

Councilor Wilson. With two councillors, we are adjourned.

Good night, everyone.