Bellingham, WA Public Health Rules: Rodent Control (2026)

010: to protect residents from infectious and contagious disease, the city bars keeping, storing, or selling food products, goods, wares, or merchandise, or occupying any building, storeroom, grain elevator, warehouse, residence, or dock, without complying with the chapter's rodent-protection requirements. 020 requires those structures to be built or repaired with screens, netting, cement, or other health-officer-approved material to keep rats and rodents out, and requires owners to equip storerooms, elevators, warehouses, and docks with traps, poison, or another approved extermination method. 030: they must anchor in the stream when not loading or unloading, maintain rat guards on shorelines while working, and withdraw gangplanks from shore outside working hours.

040, including weekly baiting or trapping. 050: whoever owns, operates, or controls any structure in the city is responsible for exterminating rodents on the premises, and that responsibility extends outward to the nearest adjoining property line, not just the building itself. The health officer is the approving authority for extermination methods and construction materials throughout the chapter, and the rule applies to every structure in the city, residential and commercial alike, not just food-handling or storage buildings.