After a four-month search, New York City has found its new rat czar.
Kathleen Corradi, an educator and land use and sustainability expert with the city’s Education Department, was introduced on Wednesday by Mayor Eric Adams, who described Ms. Corradi as a “maestro” who would coordinate efforts to address New York’s rat problem.
She will have a daunting task: The job description called for someone with “the drive, determination and killer instinct needed to fight the real enemy: New York City’s relentless rat population.”
The ideal candidate for the position — officially titled director of rodent mitigation — needed to have the “stamina and stagecraft” to defeat the city’s legions of rats, described as “cunning, voracious, and prolific.”
Ms. Corradi is not a trained rodentologist. A former elementary schoolteacher, she developed the city’s Zero Waste Schools initiative while at the Education Department and led the agency’s rodent reduction efforts.
“You’ll be seeing a lot of me and lot less rats,” said Ms. Corradi, who will be paid $155,000 a year.
Ms. Corradi will oversee the city’s existing army of rat experts. The city’s Department of Health and Mental Hygiene already has a rodent biologist on staff, the renowned urban rodentologist Robert Corrigan, who has been busy installing movement sensors on city streets to monitor rat behavior. The Health Department also has an Office of Pest Control. There is a citywide rodent task force.
The new rat czar comes to the position at a particularly precarious time and faces pressure to deliver results. The number of rat sightings documented by city inspectors doubled last year, according to city data. The city blamed the jump on an increase in inspections.
The increase in rat sightings was also blamed on the cutback in sanitation services related to budget cuts during the pandemic, some of which Mr. Adams has reversed.
The mayor has not been shy about bringing up his long-term relationship with rats.
He claims that his home was overrun by rats as a child. He also says that he had a pet rat named Mickey. As the borough president of Brooklyn, Mr. Adams earned the scorn of animal rights activists by demonstrating a device that drowned rodents in a bucket, creating what could only be described as a rat stew.
More recently, the mayor fought several tickets for rat infestation at the townhouse he rents to tenants on Lafayette Avenue in Brooklyn, telling an administrative judge that he had spent thousands of dollars battling rodents there. Two tickets were dismissed but Mr. Adams was ordered to pay a $300 fine on a third.