As health dist. says no to special rat district, county, cities, legislators grapple with spread from ‘rat highway’
The rats are here — and leaders want better tools to curb their spread.
The Ada County Board of Commissioners hosted a meeting Tuesday evening with elected officials representing all Ada County cities to discuss the severity of the region’s rat infestation and how to tackle it.
Leaders discussed the types of calls and reports they’re getting from residents, the steps they’re taking to address them, and the broader actions they believe are needed to address the threat. By the end of the evening, a tentative action plan had formed: sharing reports on rat sightings and infestations with one central entity, the Idaho State Department of Agriculture, which can display a heat map of rat locations; individual cities and counties monitoring their own facilities for potential infestations; and meeting later to form a plan on supporting community members who may not be able to afford rat control.
Though many expressed interest in creating a special abatement district to address rats, Casey Johnson, a board member of the Idaho Pest Management Association, advocated against such a measure, expressing a variety of concerns, including that inexperienced, non-licensed people trying to control rats could ultimately make them even more difficult to catch. Central District Health Director Kristin Ryan also said that the district could not support the creation of an abatement district at this time due to a lack of evidence of disease spread caused by rats. CDH recently gave $250,000 to Ada County for use on the rat issue.
Other leaders at the meeting included two staff members from the Idaho State Department of Agriculture, and State Rep. John Gannon, D-Boise, and Sen. Tammy Nichols, R-Middleton, who have written legislation on the issue over the previous two sessions that ultimately didn’t pass.
Ada County Commissioner Ryan Davidson called the meeting “historic” for bringing together so many leaders in the county in a public meeting at once.
“I think this is a great start,” Davidson said. “I think this body should probably meet again, or at least stay in communication, or perhaps form a subgroup, but I think communication between the cities and the counties and our other partners here is essential to dealing with this project.”
‘I know how destructive they can be’
Part of the discussion centered on those present at the meeting sharing stories of rat-related reports they’re hearing from residents to help the county understand the scope of the problem.
Leaders from Boise, Eagle, Meridian, Garden City, and Ada County said they had received messages from residents about rat sightings or infestations.
Meridian City Council Member Ann Little Roberts said she had spoken with people who were experiencing rats burrowing in their hot tub insulation and other places “normal animals wouldn’t go.”
“By the time they realize they’ve got rats on their property, they’ve got way more rats than they realize,” Little Roberts said, “that if they’re trapping one or two, there’s probably ten somewhere else.” One person told her they had trapped 30 rats on their property in six months.
Boise Mayor Lauren McLean said that about 80% of the calls the city is receiving are from people who have seen rats, while the other 20% are seeking information on what can be done about the problem.
While all leaders agreed that rats are a pressing issue, some challenged the idea that rats were recent arrivals.
Eagle City Council Member Craig Kvamme said that despite the popular belief that the rat problem originated in Eagle, rats had been in the Treasure Valley longer than just the past few years.
“I want to make that clear: (Eagle is) definitely involved, but we did not originate the rat problem,” Kvamme said. “They’ve been here for many years.”
Eagle City Council Member Nancy Merrill agreed. She said her family’s chicken egg farm suffered a massive fire in 1989 caused by a rat chewing some wires, with the blaze killing all 500,000 birds.
“I know how destructive they can be, not only as a nuisance, but how destructive they can be in your homes,” Merrill said.
One prevalent theory is that rats came to the area as stowaways in a shipment to Eagle, as BoiseDev reported. Reports of sightings of two invasive rat species, Norway rats and roof rats, started to climb in 2024 in Eagle, BoiseDev reported.
Regardless of how long they may have been in the area, Johnson, the Idaho Pest Management Association board member, said that rats benefit from living in proximity to humans. As the human population increases, “pressure is going to go up from rodents,” he said. He said pest control companies that are licensed to control rats are helping clients with them regularly now.
Star Mayor Trevor Chadwick and Kuna City Council Member Greg McPherson said they had not heard reports of sightings or infestations in their cities. McPherson said that an employee with a pest control company told the council recently that there had been a rat sighting “roughly four miles from our downtown corridor,” which McPherson described as near a recycling facility and not technically within the Kuna city limits.
No one representing irrigation districts was present for the discussion. During the conversation, leaders said such infrastructure, including the vegetation surrounding canals and drainage ditches, provides vast, interconnected corridors for rat spread in the area. Gannon, the Boise legislative representative, said that areas in the city with proximity to canals are experiencing some of the biggest rat issues.
“That seems to be the rat highway, where rats move from home to home and down the canal,” Gannon said.
A need for collecting, sharing information on rat problems
Leaders talked about the action they have been able to take so far, barriers to taking action, and what they would like to see happen to address the issue.
McLean said that the city is collecting information from residents and researching what regions elsewhere have done to successfully combat rats. She credited Boise City Council Member Jimmy Hallyburton with leading the information search and said it appears that areas that take a region-wide approach, rather than city by city, tend to have the most success.
She said the city is considering a menu of potential actions, including adopting ordinances to regulate food and feed storage so as not to attract rats. She said that the city has not had any major infestations on city properties, but is looking to audit its properties to identify potential hotspots and devise mitigation measures.
Most who spoke said they would support some kind of shared approach to the issue, including using a mapping tool like a Geographic Information System, or GIS, to create a heat map of where rat issues are. Currently, some residents have taken to mapping reports and sharing widely, including Treasure Valley Pied Piper. Cities and the county reported collecting info, but it isn’t all shared in one place.
Commissioner Tom Dayley said having that information matters.
“We need that information — whether it’s a government entity dealing with it or whether it’s private enterprise, still have to know where (the problem) is,” Dayley said.
Stevie Harris, a deputy director with the Idaho State Department of Agriculture, said the agency can create an online form where people can make reports. She also said that the agency could coordinate with Central District Health and citizen groups on submitting reports. Leaders agreed this would be a key tool moving forward to centrally locate the information.
The abatement debate
Part of the difficulty in addressing the issue is that legislative efforts to amend Idaho law to give pest abatement districts the authority — and allow them to use funding — to address rats have failed.
Adam Schroeder, the director of the Ada County Weed, Pest, and Mosquito Abatement District, said that while his agency is receiving reports of rats, it does not have the legal authority to control rats. The protocol is to collect the information and direct them to potential pest management companies that can help, Schroeder said.
Multiple leaders at the meeting expressed interest in creating an abatement district to address rats.
Garden City City Council Member Wendy Carver-Herbert said that as a leader in a small city, having an abatement district could help the city get in front of the issue.
“We would really prefer to see this as an abatement district approach as opposed to an individual city approach,” Carver-Herbert said.
Little Roberts, the Meridian City Council member, agreed.
“It’s going to take, I think, an abatement district, as well as people protecting their own homes from rats,” Little Roberts said, adding that an abatement district could work with pest control companies.
But Johnson, the Idaho Pest Management Association board member, said his organization would not be supportive of an abatement district for several reasons.
Johnson cautioned that the hours required to control a rat problem is huge, and pushes the costs of an abatement district higher than leaders would anticipate. He also said that abatement district personnel would not need to be licensed to trap rats. He said that could pose a problem because rats are very smart, and neophobic, meaning they may not readily investigate new objects, like traps, in their environment, and may learn to avoid them.
He said that sometimes people think they’re doing a good job at catching rats, when really, they’re catching naive, young rats.
“The little juvenile, dumb ones get caught, and the smart ones learn, and then they don’t go to traps anymore,” he said. “So, if we have people who are not trained correctly taking care of rat control, we are going to create a population of rats that will not be trapable or baitable, and so forth. They will not be controllable.”
He said pest control companies would prefer to see resources go to education and directing people to professional companies.
Another key player in the discussion also said they could not support an abatement district: Kristin Ryan, the Central District Health director. Ryan said that to form such a district, there has to be a risk to public health, including evidence that the spread of the animal is leading to an increase in disease. Though rats are vectors for leptospirosis, hantavirus, and other diseases, Ryan said the district lacks data showing increasing cases of such diseases.
“We’re not seeing an increase in disease which would support an abatement district at this time,” Ryan said. She said the district, which covers Ada, Boise, Elmore, and Valley counties, is monitoring the situation closely, and an increase in diseases “would change the situation dramatically.”
Ryan said that meanwhile, taking a proactive approach toward educating the public on the issue could be helpful. She said the district is largely still in the information gathering phase and could benefit from having regular meetings with cities and the county to discuss hotspots and how to address them.
She agreed with the idea of mapping hotspots and said, “Relying on commercial applicators to go in and address those hotspots is a good partnership.” She also noted the amount of land owned by cities, counties, and irrigation districts, saying, “There’s no reason we can’t be very aggressive in those areas to try to reduce populations.”
Gannon said he is concerned about residents having to pay for rat control services from private companies on top of dealing with inflated prices on everyday expenses.
“This is costing our people money, and the pesticide people are always going to be in business because we’ve got all kinds of other things — we got spiders, we got mice, and all that,” Gannon said. “My focus is how do we get to the point where we’ve got this thing under control, so that people are not being burdened with another… you could call it a tax, or another financial burden, on top of everything else they already have to pay?”
McLean and Ada County Commissioner Rod Beck said they supported some kind of solution beyond individual action.
Beck said, “We can later figure out what we can do to help those that can’t help themselves, but that’s a longer-term discussion,” he said, adding that the county and the legislature could potentially help with it.