Officials from Boise, Garden City, Meridian, Eagle, Kuna and Star met up Wednesday to discuss what to do about Ada County’s growing rat problem.
While everyone seemed to agree action is necessary, the how and the who is a different question.
“We need to do something,” said Star Mayor Trevor Chadwick. “You need to isolate [the problem] and destroy it basically before it becomes a bigger problem..
"What that looks like, I have no idea,” he said, adding the city only levies $2.1 million in property taxes on a $5.5 billion value.
“So very little money comes into our community there to be able to take care of stuff like this and other needs. And so if there's going to be a greater effort, it needs to come from a higher level,” Chadwick said.
Officials disagreed on what the role of private pest control companies should be or if a district-wide abatement program would be better. They did agree on a first step: identifying how big the problem is through a unified reporting platform.
Rep. John Gannon (D-Boise) also advocated for a coordinated response between federal, state and local entities and encouraged community-wide education.
Boise Mayor Lauren McLean said the city is looking to collaborate with Central District Health on a public campaign to make sure residents understand best practices.
“The do's and don'ts to prevent or avoid more spread,” she said. “We're also looking at doing an internal audit of city facilities and to identify any hotspots and figure out the best path forward for mitigation and eradication.”
Central District Health has dedicated $250,000 to the issue. Director Kristin Ryan suggested the group meet regularly to figure out who would address infestations as they popped up.
“We're all just going to have to anticipate getting to know each other a little bit and having frequent conversations,” she said, “where we look at the data and we say, ‘okay, gosh, we're seeing an infestation in this area.’ Who's going to target it? How are we going to target it? How do we deal with this problem?
“It's going to be kind of a triage approach,” she said.
