Rat fighting mayor fined for infestation

Mayor Eric Adams hates rats so much that he once called a press conference to demonstrate a device for drowning them in poison.

Now Adams is contesting a $300 fine imposed by his own administration for a rat infestation in a building he owns in Brooklyn.

On May 10, the city’s Department of Sanitation issued a subpoena to Adams after a sanitation inspector found “fresh rat droppings” at his Lafayette Avenue home in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood .

The New York Times reports that Adams attended a municipal administrative court hearing on Tuesday to contest the $300 fine, which was imposed after he first ignored the subpoena.

Adams told the hearing officer he spent nearly $7,000 fighting rats on the property and even used the rat-drowning device he pioneered in 2019 when he was Brooklyn Borough President, the Times said. .

Adams noted that city laws are designed to penalize homeowners for failing to take steps to prevent and control rodents, according to the Times. “I took those steps,” she said, “and I will continue to do so.”

The hearing officer at the Office of Administrative Trials and Hearings, known as OATH, said he would deliver a verdict within 30 days.

After Adams failed to respond to the initial summons, he was entered in absentia.

The Times reported that Adams asked Rahul Agarwal, Deputy Chief Counsel in the mayor’s office, to file a motion to override Sept. 8 on the mayor’s behalf. In the motion, Agarwal said Adams was not notified of the subpoena until Sept. 1 because he now lives in Gracie Mansion, the mayor’s residence in Manhattan.

The administrative hearing this week was scheduled after Agarwal requested an earlier date on Adams’ behalf, according to the Times.

The leader of a government watchdog group criticized the involvement of a municipal lawyer in the affair.

Betsy Gotbaum, executive director of the Citizens’ Union, said, “City resources should be used for city business, not for the personal business of the mayor or any other elected official.” “The mayor should not be appointing any city employee to help him sort out what is clearly a private legal form.”

An Adams spokesman said the mayor did nothing wrong. “He spent thousands of dollars fixing an infestation in his Brooklyn residence earlier this year, and was pleased to appear before OATH today to make a statement,” the mayor’s press secretary said Tuesday. Fabien Levy.

The administrative hearing comes a week after Adams, a Democrat and mayor since earlier this year, posted a job opening for a director of rodent mitigation, also known as the rat czar. The ideal candidate is “highly motivated and somewhat bloodthirsty, determined to pursue all solutions from various angles, including operational efficiency improvement, data collection, technological innovation, waste management and wholesale culling” , according to the announcement.

Levy says Adams “has made no secret that he hates rats, whether they roam the streets or terrorize the occupants of buildings.”