Ratified

It’s a late-night comedy writer’s dream. All it needs is its own laugh track: A building is filled with politicians, lawyers and rats. An exterminator is called. Get rid of them, he’s told. . . . You get the idea.

It isn’t an act likely to play well with the Los Angeles City Council and hundreds of other city employees preparing to move into their new quarters at City Hall East. In fact, they might want to leave all their food, plants and stacks of papers behind.

The rats, you see, love that stuff.

And the legendarily tenacious rodents infest the new quarters, where the mayor already occupies the eighth floor and the city attorney has offices on the 16th, 17th and 18th floors.

Attorneys and their staffs regularly report finding sinister tooth marks on candy left on desktops overnight; stealthy shadows slink across floors and shrieks from cleaning crews have become part of the background noise.

The problem has gotten so bad that City Atty. James K. Hahn recently sent a letter to the head of General Services complaining that the infestation has affected staff morale and could threaten his employees’ health and safety.

“This didn’t seem to be a problem until just recently,” Hahn said. “We think they’ve been disturbed with all this remodeling on the lower floors. . . . Attorneys and support staff are complaining about it.”

The Los Angeles County Health Department isn’t particularly amused, either. Its inspectors recently found that the “rodent infestation on the 17th floor” has become so bad that they cited the city for violating the health code and ordered it to clean up the problem. So traps have been set, air conditioning vents are going to be covered with plastic and computer cable holes will be filled.

And yet the rodents--and the jokes--keep coming.

“I thought the rats were moving into the third and fourth floors,” chuckled one City Hall official.

“The rats are smarter than the constituents: They’re leaving when the council’s coming.”

And another: “What’s that line about the sinking ship?”

It goes on. And on.

Some people, however, are not amused.

“My sympathy for rats has run its course,” said Jay Brewer, Hahn’s administrative coordinator, who has been put in charge of overseeing the extermination efforts and fielding the complaints. “There have been several rat sightings during the day. If they’re bold enough to come out in the daytime, they are probably hungry and thirsty. They’re eating our plants. They’re eating candy, anything that’s left out.”

But, as Hahn says, how do you tell employees in a huge law firm to get rid of paper, soda cans, water bottles? Let alone all the candy from sales for school fund-raisers, and at this time of year, the Girl Scout cookies that are as inevitable as death and taxes.

“Wait till the council moves over here,” Hahn said. “They won’t tolerate it for a second.”

Hahn says he left a box of nuts and dried fruit on his desk one Friday and returned Monday morning to a neatly chewed-open box and pistachio shells strewn on his desk.

Then there was the evening he heard a cleaning woman scream and he saw a shadow scurrying down the hallway.

But the council members, notorious snackers who can’t make it through a meeting without a steady stream of chips, cookies, muffins, fruit, juice and coffee, might just hand the city attorneys some relief: The council’s floating buffet may lure the rodents back downstairs.

Nobody’s counting on it, though. So, in an effort to root out the vermin, the city has hired an exterminator, who plans to set nearly 370 traps over eight weeks to try to bring down the rodent population.

“It’s a pretty bad problem,” said Ed Hunter, the building construction and maintenance superintendent. “It’s hard for us to get a handle on eradicating them, so we have to use specialists.”

“They’re comfortable up there to the point where they’re walking around in the daytime,” Hunter said. “They have a food source, so there’s no reason to leave.”

Some suggested that a cat could help. Or the Pied Piper.

City workers already have set some traps with success.

“We’ve caught some real whoppers,” said Jim Egnatoff, a carpenter supervisor also working on the problem.

But they’ve also snagged some young rodents, a telling sign: “It means they’re breeding,” said Brewer. Rodents are like that.

“And the older ones are getting smarter: they know how to get around the traps.”

Sort of like older . . . never mind.