(AP) A building, center, owned by New York Mayor Eric Adams, located at 936 Lafayette Avenue in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood in the Brooklyn borough of New York, is shown Wednesday Dec. 7, 2022. Adams is such an enemy of rats that he once called a press conference to demonstrate a contraption for drowning them in poison, finds himself contesting a $300 fine issued by his own administration over a rat infestation at the building he owns in Brooklyn. (AP Photo/Bebeto Matthews)
A building, center, owned by New York Mayor Eric Adams, located at 936 Lafayette Avenue in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood in the Brooklyn borough of New York, is shown Wednesday Dec. 7, 2022. Adams is such an enemy of rats that he once called a press conference to demonstrate a contraption for drowning them in poison, finds himself contesting a $300 fine issued by his own administration over a rat infestation at the building he owns in Brooklyn. (AP Photo/Bebeto Matthews)
A city health department inspector had issued two new summonses last month, just one day after the Democratic mayor appeared remotely before a hearing officer on Dec. 6 to get a $300 summons for rats at his property dismissed.
“A rat burrow was observed along the ledge of the fenceline at front right,” the inspector wrote. ”Fresh rat droppings were observed in front of the garbage bins in the yard at front right.”
Not true, Adams insisted. “I have a camera at the house, and I looked back on that date,” he said. “My yard is clean. My garbage is in containers. I go there, I sweep up. My place is clean.”
An administrative hearing on the new summonses is scheduled for Jan. 12, and Adams said he would plead his case once again. “I encourage any New Yorker: You get a summons, you feel it was done unjustly, go and fight it,” Adams said. “And that’s what I’m going to do. I’m going to follow the process.”
Adams was asked about rats at an unrelated news conference after the Daily News reported the latest violations. The mayor, who had made rat eradication a key policy goal for the city, said he is equally committed to ridding his own house of the pests.
“I spent $7,000 to do rat mitigation,” he said. “You have to be really scared of rats to spend $7,000.”
