Loeun Lay's singular crusade against a city scourge began with a few sticks and pieces of string. Fifty pounds of brick and several pieces of plywood later, he'd snatched a month of plunder. "Thirty rats in 30 days," the computer programmer bragged to fellow residents of Providence's West End at a recent community meeting. "I caught 30 of them with my home-made trap."

At least twice, the rats near Lay's Bellevue Avenue home had chewed his car-battery wires to the point that his car wouldn't start. So he decided to pick up where, he says, the city left off. "Nobody else is doing anything," Lay says. "I had to do something."

Vicoria Peah, a behavioral therapist who also lives in the West End, agrees that the rat problem has grown to frightening proportions. "They're so bold," she says. "They're starting to migrate from the street right into my yard."

The discussion came during a community awareness campaign sponsored by local nonprofit Groundwork Providence and funded by a grant from the US Environmental Protection Agency. The $10,000 grant paid for glossy handouts -- in English, Spanish, and Khmer, the language of Cambodia -- which Groundwork Providence staffers are distributing during meetings around the city. Other handout topics include lead poisoning, recycling, litter, gardening, brown fields, pollution, and nutrition.

Yet some city dwellers say that a few flyers won't tackle a problem as pervasive as Providence's pesky rats. Other cities take a much more active role in rat-prevention, according to Providence city staffers: New York has an online rat-complaint form, and Chicago issues on-the-spot tickets to restaurateurs who fail to contain their refuse adequately.

The Providence City Council recently tried to address this growing concern. Earlier this year, the council passed an ordinance that makes it the responsibility of trash dumpers -- not trash haulers -- to properly enclose garbage. The new law also ups fines to $50 for residential offenses, and $250 or $500 for violations by commercial dumpers.

But Councilwoman Rita Williams admits the new law doesn't address how to enforce the rules -- or, ultimately, how to rid the city of rats. Offenders have ignored past Public Works Department citations and are unlikely to take the problem more seriously without a more public approach, she says. "I represent Ward Two -- on the East Side," Williams says. "So I don't have the rat problem that other wards do, that's for sure. But I think it's something everyone in the city is going to have to start thinking about, if we don't do something now."

Issue Date: June 7 - 13, 2002