NEW YORK — Mayor Eric Adams has paid off a $300 ticket he was hit with for failing to address a rodent infestation at his Brooklyn rowhouse, city records show.
A Health Department inspector issued the fine in December, writing in a summons that she had detected “harborage conditions that encourage the nesting of rats” in the front yard of Adams’ Bedford-Stuyvesant home, including improperly disposed recyclables. The inspector also wrote Adams’ property was “known to be rodent infested.”
Adams appealed the ticket in a hearing before an Office of Administrative Trials and Hearings officer last month. But the officer denied the appeal, and ordered the mayor to cough up the $300.
The mayor could’ve opted to appeal again, but city records show he at some point this week paid off the ticket in full.
A spokesman for the mayor did not immediately return a request for comment Wednesday afternoon.
In last month’s OATH hearing, Adams also appealed a separate $300 ticket he had been hit with for a “rat burrow” the inspector observed along Adams’ front-yard fence. The officer granted that appeal, and let Adams of the hook for the monetary levy.
The mayor’s decision to settle his rat debt caps off a wild sequence of rodent-related events involving his Brooklyn house.
After the tickets were first issued last year, Curtis Sliwa, Adams’ onetime Republican mayoral challenger, showed up at the property with an offer to help eradicate the pests on the block by fostering a feral cat colony in the neighborhood. Sliwa also offered to become Adams’ director of rodent mitigation free of charge.
Adams, who has made addressing the city’s rodent problem a cornerstone of his municipal agenda, rejected Sliwa’s offer. The mayor has yet to hire someone for the newly-created director of rodent mitigation post.
