NYC Mayor: 'The Rats Are Going to Hate Kathy'

UPDATE Apr 13, 2023 3:10 PM CDT

New York City officially has a rat czar. Kathleen Corradi was named Wednesday as the city's first-ever director of rodent mitigation—a well-paying gig. Corradi, who previously served as the Queens director of space planning in the city's education department, will earn $155,000 per year, Mayor Eric Adams said, per CNN. She'll coordinate city agencies in efforts to find "innovative ways to cut off rats’ food sources" and use "new technologies to detect and exterminate rat populations," according to the mayor's office. "The rats are going to hate Kathy, but we're excited to have her leading this important effort," added Adams. Corradi said "rats, and the conditions that help them thrive will no longer be tolerated—no more dirty curbs, unmanaged spaces, or brazen burrowing."

Dec 2, 2022 6:19 AM CST

Now that New York City is required to reveal salaries in most of its job listings, there's one for $120,000 to $170,000 recently posted by Mayor Eric Adams' administration that might catch everyone's eye—but it's a "daunting" one, per the AP. The city is seeking a "director of rodent mitigation," aka a rat czar, to handle the Big Apple's longtime pest problem. Applicants for the high-paying gig need to have, as Liam Neeson might put it, a very particular set of skills. Yes, applicants must have at least a bachelor's degree; experience in urban planning, project management, government, or other related fields; and the usual organizational and tech proficiency many managers prefer, per the job posting.

It adds that interested parties have to also be "somewhat bloodthirsty" and possess a "swashbuckling attitude, crafty humor, and general aura of badassery." Applicants must be "determined to look at all solutions from various angles," which in some cases might include "wholesale slaughter" of the pests described in the job post as "cunning, voracious, and prolific." The New York Times notes that the city already has a pest control office, as well as a rodent task force and "urban rodentologist" embedded in the city's Department of Health. However, Meera Joshi, the city's deputy mayor for operations, says there's no one that's been tasked with coordinating all of these efforts against the rats, which have long been an issue in the city.

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The mayor himself, who had a rat named Mickey for a pet when he was a kid, is said to have a deep-rooted, career-long "fixation" on the rodents, per the Times, which notes that before his first year in office is even completed, Adams has already made at least a half-dozen announcements related to getting rid of the city's rats. During his tenure as the president of the borough of Brooklyn, Adams once eagerly demonstrated use of a trap that lured rats into a bucket filled with a "toxic soup," leading to their drowning, per the AP. "There's nothing I hate more than rats," Adams said in a statement, per Gothamist, which first reported on the attention-grabbing job posting. "Getting our city clean and ridding our streets of these filthy creatures are key to our recovery." (More rats stories.)