Desert Village Homeowner's Association

Letter from a Homeowner

Rats

From: Evnick1@aol.com Add to Address Book Add Mobile Alert
Date: Fri, 15 Jun 2007 18:43:27 EDT
Subject: Desert Village - RATS!!!
To: Patricia@goldcoastent.com
CC: anne645537@yahoo.com
Patricia:

Please pass this on to Jerry for me when he comes back Monday. I would appreciate some sort of response as to what is or can be done. It should be a topic for the 6/23 Board Meeting.

You may have heard one resident recently had to pay about $500 to get wires repaired under the hood of his car where rats had chewed through them. The Honda dealer was nice enough to tell me yesterday there were rat tracks and residue on my engine block. I reported a few weeks ago a large number of rats running across the green-space on the wash.

While rats and insects may a part of life in the desert, we don't have to live like we are in a Third World Country where no effort is made to mitigate the problem. I have expressed concern more than once (with no response) about the afternoon watering during hot weather, most of which evaporates into the air or blows against residents' windows. The green-space is watered heavily. In spite of all this, there are still patches or brown grass throughout the complex. I'm sure the rats appreciate it. It has also contributed to mosquitos, which we rarely see here, flies and gnats being in abundance.

Fruit is left laying on the ground until the landscapers get around to picking it up. Maybe some residents would stoop to picking up a piece now and then themselves if their car wires were chewed through by rats after they snack on a grapefruit?

More than one resident insists on throwing wild birdseed out around units to feed the doves. This is one of the rats' favorite snack.

CV Vector Control was in the paper recently with a nice article about what a vector is -- all of the above. Maybe they or the city of Rancho Mirage would take action to reduce the population. The CV Water District highly recommends NOT watering other than late evening or early morning, particularly during high temperatures. Their rates are also going up, which indicates we should be cutting back. Besides, I thought we were moving to desert landscape which requires less water and care.