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Rodents may not have a seat at City Hall, but they were the main topic at a hearing this past Friday.

City councilors Elizabeth ‘Liz’ Breadon and Edward ‘Ed’ Flynn organized a discussion about the status of the Boston Rodent Action Plan, bringing together neighbors and a panel of city workers involved in carrying out the plan.

The plan, released in July 2024, was touted as a citywide effort to reduce the impacts of rodent activity on the city’s residents. Its strategy is marked by commitments to surveillance, waste management, data collection, and technological integration.

John Ulrich, assistant commissioner of environmental sanitation, said his team had issued 785 violations, inspected 3,000 dumpsters and conducted 210 construction sanitation inspections since the beginning of the year. Inspectors also completed 25 community walkthroughs to address areas with recurring complaints through education and enforcement.

In Allston, officials said crews are regularly treating burrows at Ringer Park and measuring the results with monitoring technology. Ulrich said the department believes it has open cases involving all three property management companies across the park’s fence and plans to keep those cases open because of recurring trash problems. The Parks Department is also investing in debris removal to give inspectors better access to burrows.

Despite the work underway, Breadon said Allston-Brighton is still waiting for targeted interventions promised, as it is listed as a Priority Action Neighborhood in the plan. Rodent-resistant trash cans discussed for Allston Village have yet to be installed.

Allston-Brighton testifies

One Allston resident testified in person, and the neighborhood’s business community was heard over Zoom.

Kelly McGrath, Brighton resident and executive director of Brighton Main Streets, said, “Rats are a business corridor issue, not just a residential one,” adding that food businesses deal with overflowing dumpsters, overnight trash, and rodent burrows along commercial blocks.

“As we review the status of the road and action plan, we hope enforcement and follow through reach the commercial corridors with the same urgency as residential blocks and keep reporting back to the districts on what the data shows,” said McGrath. “Our businesses will do their part on sanitation, but we need a plan to meet us there.”

Lexi Gross, Allston resident, emphasized the importance of accessible communication, saying: “We need a coordinated, multilingual communication strategy reaching the landlords, the tenants, the students, universities, the restaurants, and businesses, and not just Boston regionally.”

Gross hoped that the City would coordinate its strategy beyond its borders, naming Cambridge, Brookline, and Wellesley as neighboring cities she hoped the administration would work with.

Rodent action from across neighborhood borders

Residents elsewhere in the city described their grassroots efforts when the city has not stepped in. In the St. Botolph area near Northeastern University, neighbors and the Colonnade Hotel worked together to fully contain the hotel’s trash.

In the Back Bay, block captains have educated residents about moving cars to avoid wiring damage, and one block captain proposed a pilot comparing white kitchen trash bags with black contractor bags.

What’s to come for the Boston Rodent Action Plan

Beyond the work of neighbors, city officials are continuing to move forward in the Boston Rodent Action Plan.

This upcoming winter and spring, Jeff Kaplan of the City’s Analytics team is focused on using new and old technology to track where and why rodent activity is heightened.

His team is piloting a “hotspot model” to flag areas with sanitary code violation spikes, 311 complaint clusters, and overdue inspections, and testing audio sensors from the nonprofit Basis Research Institute to detect rodents. In late March and early April, a new round of surface sensors is planned to arrive at the Commonwealth Development apartments in Brighton, which is also known as Fidelis Way.

Luke Hines, a co-chair of the Boston Rodent Action Plan, made a tentative plan to produce a report on the effectiveness of the plan by Summer of 2027.

Several questions went unanswered, including when Allston-Brighton’s priority status will be reassessed. In the meantime, residents can report negative impacts from rodent activity to 311 and email rats@boston.gov. Inspectional Services says it responds within 24 to 48 hours.