BOISE — Mayors, commissioners and public servants from partisan and nonpartisan offices and all of Ada County’s cities came together Wednesday night to declare war on a common enemy: rats.

Namely, the Norway and roof rats that have become endemic to the Boise area. While their population numbers are unknown because local agencies do not currently track them, the citizen-created website Treasure Valley Pied Piper has mapped more than 500 reported sightings, the vast majority concentrated in Ada County.

Many of the elected officials participating in the forum, held at the county courthouse, had anecdotes of their own to share as well — sometimes dating back decades.

“I will tell you that one rat chewing through a wire can cause a fire that’s the biggest fire the city of Eagle has ever known, and destroy 500,000 birds,” said Eagle council member and former mayor Nancy Merrill, who attributed the 1989 fire that destroyed her family’s egg farm to rodents.

State Rep. John Gannon spoke of a constituent, also in Eagle, whose car’s wiring sustained thousands of dollars in rat-inflicted damage.

Boise Mayor Lauren McLean said locals frequently contacted the city to report sightings, Garden City council member Wendy Carver-Herbert said she had frequent conversations on the campaign trail about the rat issue, and Meridian council member Anne Little Roberts said her municipality had fielded calls from residents with rats in their walls.

Only Star Mayor Trevor Chadwick and Kuna council member Greg McPherson said that their governments had not received reports or complaints of rats. The Pied Piper website has no reported sightings logged for Star, and only one in Kuna.

“Everyone in the audience might think all the rats are up here — we’ve got a whole room full of politicians!” McPherson said.

THE FACTS ABOUT RATS

Norway (also known as brown) and roof (also known as black) rats are the two most troublesome rat species locally, per a presentation by county Weed, Pest and Mosquito Abatement director Adam Schroeder.

Besides their colors, the species can be differentiated by their sizes and preferred habitats: Norway rats are larger and ground-dwelling, while roof rats are smaller and seek elevated spaces.

“Anecdotal evidence is that these populations are increasing,” Schroeder said. “They reach sexual maturity in three to five months. The gestation period is about three weeks, so in 24 days, a rat can give birth to as many as six to 10 pups, four to six times a year.”

Life expectancy is between three months to a year. The rats can be vectors for diseases like leptospirosis, salmonellosis, hantavirus and bubonic plague.

Access to food, warm weather, lack of natural predators and urban infrastructure are all factors in Ada County that can bolster rat population levels. Irrigation canals make for convenient travel routes, and Schroeder said that residents who live near them report rat issues in high numbers.

POTENTIAL ABATEMENT AVENUES

Schroeder stressed that his Weed, Pest and Mosquito Abatement agency is unequipped to combat rats because of a lack of funding and qualifications.

“Mosquito abatement and rat control — they’re two different beasts. Entirely different structures are required to operate those kinds of business operations,” he said. “Any rat control operation is not typically handled by municipal agencies alone, but partnered with health departments or health control districts and commercial industry.”

Carver-Herbert and Little Roberts spoke favorably of the possibility of establishing a specific rat abatement district, but pest control contractor Casey Johnson warned against the idea.

Johnson, who serves on the board for the Idaho Pest Management Association, argued that the costs would be immense due to the extensive labor hours required to mitigate rats in one home alone.

“The other part of that is, abatement districts don’t have to be licensed because it is county grounds,” Johnson said. “With mosquitoes, that’s great. When it comes to rat control, with a product that is super heavily regulated and under attack like rodenticides, you put it in the hands of people who are not licensed and fully trained properly, and they go out there and do that wrong, then you have dogs dying. You have secondary poisonings.”

He said that public agencies should focus on education and helping residents connect with pest control professionals.

Though Central District Health (CDH) recently committed $250,000 for rat mitigation to Ada County, its director, Kristin Ryan, declined to endorse the abatement district idea as her agency had not seen an increase in disease attributable to rats.

“Of course, (an increase in disease) would change the situation dramatically,” Ryan said. “We aren’t wanting to be cops. We aren’t wanting to go on people’s private property without their permission.”

An official state-endorsed tool for tracking and logging rat incidents — akin to the Pied Piper or another Eagle-based, citizen-compiled sighting group on Nextdoor — was an idea that the meeting’s participants were able to rally around as a first step.

“I think that’s an important component, to just make sure that we do have everybody on one page, so we don’t just have multiple maps out there and then trying to piece those together. We just have a central location where we can put that information,” said state Sen. Tammy Nichols, one of two state legislators to take part in the meeting.

Stevie Harris, a deputy state Department of Agriculture director, said that her agency could take reports through the phone and via a form it could set up on its website, in coordination with CDH and citizen sources.

“I hope all these cities can hook up with Kristin, our health director, and help coordinate with the Department of Agriculture and get this handled,” said Ada County Board chair Rod Beck, who also chaired the meeting.