A Dirty Little War : Rats That Invaded Government Center Turn Tail

A war on rats that broke out three months ago inside the Ventura County Government Center appears to be in its final stages, officials say.

There hasn’t been a rat spotted in the last 30 days, and the county’s top rat catcher thinks there is at least some light at the end of the tunnel.

“We’re winning,” declared Tom Womack, the county’s deputy director of facilities and grounds.

The battle started in July when rats began moving in on the offices of the Board of Supervisors and many of the other top officials in the county complex at Victoria Avenue and Telephone Road in Ventura.

The invasion was first reported by County Counsel Jim McBride.

“At first we thought they were mice, but sightings of the animals reveal that some of them are the size of cats,” he wrote in a July memo.

McBride’s first step was to forbid county staff from leaving food out unless it was sealed in a metal tin. That worked until some of the rats learned how to remove the lids and get into the goodies.

With that came the first escalation in the war--an order to remove all food from the premises each day. But the rats didn’t give up easily.

“Left at night without food in the offices, the rats are now eating our law books and other objects, including a wood pen and pencil set,” McBride noted in the July memo.

Not only that, the rats were creating “a health hazard, as they leave feces and urine on the furniture . . . and a morale problem, as employees are reluctant to enter their offices in the morning,” McBride reported.

A turning point for McBride and other officials was when a rat, described as snarling, blocked a restroom that Ed Sajor, an administrative assistant to Supervisor John K. Flynn, needed to use.

“They dispensed that one with a shovel,” Sajor said.

About that time, the county brought in ineffective anti-rat devices that McBride described as “small boards containing a sticky substance and a few nuts.”

He said the boards apparently were designed to capture mice. “The rats find them of no consequence in that they leave footprints in the sticky substance and continue to ravage the offices,” he said.

Since then, the county has been using more efficient rat traps with considerably more success.

“We’ve caught about 10,” Womack said. “I think we’re making progress. The first ones were biggies. The last ones, smaller.”

County workers also plugged holes where pipes enter the building, sealed the bottoms of utility doors and hacked branches from an avocado tree that provides ready access to the roof of the county’s administrative building.

Womack believes that an excavation project prompted the invasion at the start of summer. He is worried that future construction work in the area may trigger another invasion.

“When someone starts digging, rats leave home,” he said. “Apparently they’ll go for miles. We’ve already been warned to expect an assault from upcoming work on Highway 101.”