Meadville Housing Authority officials said this week that they are making progress in their efforts to eradicate bedbugs and other pests that have bedeviled residents in authority apartments.
Following the authority’s monthly meeting Wednesday, Executive Director Vanessa Rockovich said there had “definitely” been improvements at Holland Towers, located on Market Street, and William Gill Commons on Walker Drive, over the past several months and expressed optimism regarding future pest treatment.
“We have a good maintenance program, so we’ll be on top of it,” she said. “It’s not going to get to the point that it was because we will have regular monthly inspections and that will continue.”
In addition to monthly inspections, Rockovich said each apartment at the two facilities receives quarterly treatments. Units are also treated if problems become evident between the scheduled visits.
Assistant Maintenance Inspector Kyle Lynch reported during the meeting that 19 apartments had been treated over the past month. He later explained that 13 of those apartments were being treated for bedbugs, the rest for cockroaches. These treatments were in addition to regular preventative sprayings of all of the first and second floor apartments.
At Gill Commons, 12 apartments had been treated. None of those treatments involved bedbugs, according to Lynch. Regular treatments had been conducted in two of the complex’s seven groups of buildings.
At the Snodgrass Building, an 11-unit apartment house at 970 Park Ave., treatment of one unit for bedbugs was nearly complete, Lynch said.
The numbers of apartments being sprayed due to the presence of cockroaches and bedbugs mars a sharp reduction since fall. In November, Rockovich told the authority board that nearly $30,000 had been spent over a six-month period on extermination efforts at Holland Towers and Gill Commons.
At the time, 41 of 100 Gill Commons apartments and 39 of 132 Holland Towers units were being treated for infestations, according to Lynch’s report to the authority board. One unit in the Snodgrass Building was reported to have bedbugs that month.
On Wednesday, Lynch said that the reduction in the number of active treatments was due in large part to a change of exterminators from Terminix to Tri-County Pest Control of Oil City.
