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Vaughan advised residents to look for signs of rodents on their property, including overgrowth, holes under sheds and porches, and “pathways” of broken fences, as well as damaged trash barrels.

He also advised removing standing water, bird feeders and any dog waste from yards each night.

Select Board member Danielle Leonard said that while some of the advice to homeowners was commonsense, she was looking for a more widespread municipal solution to the problem beyond stressing personal responsibility to residents.

“What I’d really like to know is what you, as the head of the Board of Health, are proposing to do that might be outside of the box or on the town side to combat this problem,” she said. “I don’t think the problem is just everyone being educated about their property and how to store their trash, and to use a closed barrel. I think it’s a little more serious than that.

“What is Swampscott going to do to help the people of this town with this issue? As opposed to just putting it on the homeowner. I don’t think that’s really the direction that’s fair. I think there is a piece of this that Swampscott needs to mitigate. … We need some action.”

Vaughan said where trash violations are witnessed they are addressed with residents but that “generally, we don’t go on private property and offer pest control.”

Fitzgerald said the town needs to think about what it can do differently because “what we’ve done to date is just not enough.”

“We need to have targeted responses,” he said. “When these populations pop up, we have to pop up. We need to approach this throughout the town. It’s not a residential-vs.-business thing. We are a town and when we see infestations, we’ve got to respond to this.

“We may need to think about allocating additional funding as we see spikes and increases regionally, and also here.”

Select Board member Katie Phelan noted that some dog waste bags spotted around Humphrey Street that were first thought to be improper disposal on behalf of dog owners actually turned out to be rats digging into trash barrels, which was corrected by more rate-proof trash barrels.

In Peabody, the city stationed 55 SMART boxes in “high-problem areas” in 2022 as part of what it called a “pest population control project.” These boxes, secured through Modern Pest Control, kill the rodents with an electric current and use no toxic materials or pesticides.

Peabody also placed 50 more Contrapest stations “in areas of high rodent activity.” This program through A-1 Exterminators includes a “fertility control” bait that does not kill the rats but makes both male and female rodents unable to reproduce.

Fitzgerald stressed that the town is looking to use nonpoisonous solutions to the rat problem because rat poison gets into the bloodstreams of hawks, owls, coyotes and other animals, leading to health deterioration and often death.
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Select Board Chair MaryEllen Fletcher asked that Fitzgerald and Vaughan work with the Solid Waste Committee to come up with other measures to help curb the problem and then report back to the Select Board with steps taken.

(Scott Souza is a Patch field editor covering Beverly, Danvers, Marblehead, Peabody, Salem and Swampscott. He can be reached at [email protected]. X/Twitter: @Scott_Souza.)

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