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Mission Statement:

The mission of the Fordham Bedford Housing Corporation is to improve our Bronx neighborhood by providing community run housing that is safe, sound and affordable.

Testimony by John M. Reilly at the City Council Public Hearing on Rat Infestation (November, 2000)

 

Sponsored by Councilman Adolfo Carrion Jr., with Councilman Bill Perkins on October 16, 2000 at St. Nicholas of Tolentine Church.

My name is John Reilly. I am the Executive Director of the Fordham Bedford Housing Corporation and a lifetime resident of Bedford Park in Community Board 7.

We are facing a rat infestation unlike any I have ever seen. At all of the community or tenant owned buildings managed by the Housing Corporation we are having to take extraordinary measures to keep rats form getting into our yards, basements and apartments.

I have seen rats running along Fordham Road while it was crowded with pedestrians. I have seen them in many of our local parks and playgrounds. I have placed poison and traps in my own basement and surrounded my house with safety containers filled with rat poison.

City agencies are not up to the crisis we are facing. While complaints to the Parks Department do get a response, the rat problem in our parks continues to be serious. The Dept. of Housing Preservation and Development does little more than send a notice to a negligent landlord. Our organization has stopped calling the Dept. of Health whose only response to date has been to issue summonses, sometimes to the very same people who report the problem. They seldom, if ever, conduct an ongoing abatement program.

We need an aggressive, ongoing response from our city government.

We need vacant lots to be cleaned regularly and baited.

We need litter baskets to be emptied by the Dept. of Sanitation more regularly. We need Sanitation to stop spilling trash onto sidewalks and streets when making household collections.

We need to develop new abatement requirements for construction sites and road projects which often send hundreds of rats running for nearby homes, buildings and parks.

While education and enforcement programs can have some additional impact, we most especially need programs which eliminate harborages and place poison in infested locations. This is not happening nearly enough and it needs to.

If we can mobilize an effort such as the one created for a media driven issue such as West Nile Virus, surely we can create an appropriate, coordinated response to the ongoing rat epidemic all of our neighborhoods are living with. Our organization and community will support any new City Council initiatives which will expand the city's own abatement programs designed to address this chronic and dangerous issue.
Thank you.

 

 

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  © 2006 Fordham Bedford Housing Corporation.