MTA Workers Claim Budget Cuts Lead To Rat Population Exploding

MTA Workers Claim Budget Cuts Lead To Rat Population Exploding: MTA workers protested Wednesday in front of Jamaica Central Terminal demanding that the city address what they say is a terrible rodent problem in the subway system, CBS News reports.

Members of the Transit Workers Union 100 passed out pamphlets to riders and solicited signatures for their online petition, telling people, "If You Smell Something, Sign Something."

The protesters claimed the city needs to increase the frequency of garbage pickups, put more trash bins in stations and better seal off refuse storage rooms to rodents.

The MTA's 2010 and 2011 budget cuts would eliminate 254 subway car-, track- and station-cleaning positions. And for the TWU, what the city might have saved in money, it's gaining in rats.

The trash pickups used to happen "every couple of days," Paul Flores, a 12-year subway station agent, tells NBC News. "Now it's four or five days before they pick up the garbage, and the rats just basically call that home."

As the I-O center of the economy weakens then R contagion can increase, here a boom and bust in the Iv-B economy from weak I-O policing leads to a lack of money for policing in an exponentially growing problem. In effect the garbage collectors as Oy are like predators, they ask the Ro population to cooperate to reduce the R contagion. This is like the O police asking Ro ghettoes to police the R drug addicts and prostitutes in their areas as the O police can't afford to.