There was a little-noticed omission from Mayor Bloomberg’s self-published midterm report card. While he gave himself good grades on most of the initiatives that he had promised on the campaign trail, from expanding parks to cleaning up city streets, he skipped one issue completely: rats.

Mr. Bloomberg, when he was on the stump in 2001, vowed to adopt provisions in a rat eradication report by the City Council. Yet now that he is in office, that rat attack has not materialized. With complaints seemingly growing, lawmakers are calling on Mr. Bloomberg to create an agency dedicated to running off the whiskered vermin and other pests.

The mayor told reporters yesterday he saw no reason to take the city’s rat patrol out of the hands of the Department of Public Health.

“We are not going to have a Department of Rats,” Mr. Bloomberg told reporters in East New York yesterday. “I don’t know, incidentally, that there are any numbers that say rats are more of a problem now.”

The mayor’s comments came three days after a columnist, Jack Newfield, quoted figures in The New York Sun that showed that reports of rat bites in the city averaged about 14 a month last year and about 17 a month through the first eight months of this year. Mr. Newfield also wrote, however, that the mayor’s annual management report did not include the rat bite numbers this year.

To many residents of the Upper West Side, for example, the problem seems to be growing. Some doormen in the West 80s have taken to closing their front doors to keep rats from scurrying uninvited into marbled lobbies.

A City Council member from Harlem, Bill Perkins, has been pushing for a change in the city’s rat policy since 2001.

“I don’t know why the mayor thinks we have less rats,” Mr. Perkins told The New York Sun yesterday. “But you won’t see the public agreeing with that assessment. And it isn’t just the poor neighborhoods that are having this problem. Rats like soul food and they like caviar. They like Chinese food and dog food. This is happening everywhere.”

Mr. Perkins wants the city to enact a law that requires that the plastic bags used for waste disposal be put into rat proof containers with lids. That way, rats would have to work for their food, the reasoning goes.

Now they have a virtual rodent buffet. They simply have to gnaw through thin plastic bags and feast.

Mr. Perkins said the only way to stop that is to take up Mr. Bloomberg’s much ballyhooed emphasis on accountability and put a single agency in charge of pests, in place of the current bureaucratic smorgasbord – from Health to Public Housing to Sanitation to Environmental Protection – and there is little coordination among them.

“It is very difficult to keep the rat population down. They have grown immune to the poisons and the poisons are dangerous,” Mr. Bloomberg said yesterday. “There is no easy solution. Every city is battling it. New York has always had a big problem, and certainly it is exacerbated by the plastic bags” – and vermin’s easy access to them.

While it is difficult to conduct a rat census, the best estimate seems to be that the rat population in New York City tops 56 million. That’s seven rats per person. The number could be made more manageable if Mr. Bloomberg would throw his support behind an anti-rat garbage-can law and a special pest-control agency, Mr. Perkins said.

“We’re throwing good money after bad money on this problem,” the council member said. “The manner we are spending is not effective or efficient.”

Mr. Perkins said he intends to call hearings on the issue in October or November.