Add rats to the list of potentially volatile issues in the 2005 mayoral campaign.

The City Council moved a step closer yesterday to creating a board to oversee the extermination of rats. The council’s committees on health and government operations held a joint hearing on legislation that would remove the rat-abatement program from the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, the agency that currently oversees coordinated efforts by scattered city agencies, and establish an independent City Pest Control Board.

The proposed board, which is likely to be voted on next month, would focus solely on wiping out vermin, including rats, throughout the city. Neighborhoods where the problems are said to be most acute include the South Bronx, Harlem, Bushwick, and Bedford-Stuyvesant.

The board would consist of five members appointed by the mayor, including the chairman, and two members named by the speaker of the City Council.

Although rat infestation is nothing new to this vertical, construction-happy city, there are signs that the problem has worsened in the past few years.

According to statistics from the Mayor’s Management Report, complaints about rats have jumped to 22,600 in fiscal year 2004,up from 20,900 in 2003 and 16,000 in 2002. Rat-related calls to the city’s government hotline, 311, totaled more than 11,000, up nearly sevenfold over the previous fiscal year.

The Bloomberg administration attributes the increase to augmented outreach and the easier reporting made possible by 311.

Not everyone buys the theory that what has grown is the awareness of the problem, rather than the problem itself. For one thing, rat bites seem to be on the rise, with 170 reported in calendar 2003, and 137 reported as of August for this year.

Council Member Bill Perkins, a Democrat who represents Harlem, said the new board is needed because the health department has other priorities and the city’s Rodent Control Task Force, which was created in 2003, is not responding vigorously enough to the rat problem.

“There is not one agency that is responsible for clearing this up,” Mr. Perkins told The New York Sun after the hearing. “You have to have a constant vigilance with this problem. What I know is that we are not doing that right now.”

“There is a half-hearted attention that is being employed,” Mr. Perkins added. “That would not happen if you had it all under one roof.”

Representatives of the Bloomberg administration testified against the bill, Intro 121A, to establish a new board, saying that the city’s current rat abatement program is successful and that creating what appears to be a “new agency” would be a waste of city resources.

“Intro 121 creates an unnecessary structure that is not only costly but also duplicative,” said the assistant health commissioner of veterinary and pest control services, Edgar Butts.

Mr. Butts touted the health department’s collaboration with 22 other agencies, elimination of rats at 1,200 homes, and ensuring that rat-breeding conditions were corrected in 6,500 other places. He cited several examples of success, including a chronic rodent problem in the Bronx below the 167th Grand Concourse underpass where the departments of sanitation and transportation sealed the site to the illegal dumping that was attracting rats. The city has also distributed 5,800 rodent-proof garbage receptacles in areas with severe rat problems.

Though the mayor’s press secretary, Edward Skyler, said yesterday it was premature to speculate on a veto, Mayor Bloomberg has made his opposition to the bill known.

In late September, he said, “We are not going to have a Department of Rats,” adding that it was not even clear that rats represent a growing problem.

Mr. Bloomberg, who vowed to adopt rat-eradication provisions when he was campaigning in 2001, has increased funds for pest control, but officials from DC 37, the largest union of municipal workers, testified yesterday that the number of city exterminators has actually been slashed.

Since 1997, their ranks have decreased to 94 from roughly 200, a union official, Henry Garrido, testified.

Though the city does not have a precise tally of rats scurrying through the five boroughs, Mr. Perkins has said in the past that the best estimate is roughly 56 million. Though he has no hard evidence about whether there are actually more rats now than there were last year, anecdotal evidence suggests that is the case, the council member said.

He told the Sun that while he was jogging in Central Park just hours before yesterday’s hearing, he saw a rat burrowing into a fresh hole.

In addition, a group of third-graders visiting City Hall from P.S. 235 in East Flatbush offered impromptu testimony at the hearing.

When Mr. Perkins asked the students, who were sitting in the balcony, how many of them had rats in their neighborhood, almost all immediately raised their hands.