Rat-infested piles of garbage sat uncollected in Los Angeles just one mile from City Hall, NBC 4 reported this week.

You have to see this video to believe it.

“You’re getting a bird’s eye view of L.A.’s most notorious trash pile,” the report tells us. “It’s in downtown on Ceres Avenue, right between the Fashion and Produce District. Day and night, this spot and countless others are magnets for rats that could carry fleas infected with typhus and other diseases.”

Watch the video again… This breathtaking trash pile is not in some faraway place — it’s right in downtown. It’s between the Fashion and Produce District — and that’s “produce” as in food — and there are “countless other” spots like this … downtown.

And this comes just weeks after an NBC 4 report about an “infestation in Los Angeles City Hall of rats and fleas linked to typhus disease.” Good news, though, because “the city’s personnel department announced an increase in cleaning and removal of trash from the Civic Center.”

The Civic Center was so filthy, Los Angeles City Hall was infested with rats and disease. Welcome to the Middle Ages!

When NBC 4 called the city’s services hotline, the network was told it could take up to 90 days for the Ceres Avenue trash to be hauled away.

Ninety days.

Ninety.

To pick up trash.

After the report aired, though, Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti got the street cleaned up.

Now get this…

“Between 2013 and 2017, county residents reported a yearly average of nearly 60 cases [of typhus]. That’s twice as many the number reported in the previous five years.”

“Last year, a record 124 cases were reported in Los Angeles County.”

So what we have here is what NBC 4 describes as a “typhus epidemic” … in a modern American city, in the modern American city.

Here, in the United States of America, in one of the richest cities in the world, in the 21st century, we have an outbreak of a disease spread by rats attracted by piles of uncollected garbage.

Hey, guess which political party runs Los Angeles!

Since 1961, going back 58 years, Los Angeles has had one Republican mayor, who served only two terms between 1993 and 2001.

What’s more, there are 15 seats on the Los Angeles City Council. Democrats hold 14 of them — fourteen — and they are each paid $184,610 a year, and still… The garbage is not getting picked up … in downtown … just a mile from City Hall.

I don’t mean to sound redundant, but…

The garbage is not being picked up, y’all.

Picking up garbage is one of the basic basics.

Picking up garbage is something the government is supposed to do.

The government picking up garbage is akin to a parent feeding her child, a doctor healing the sick, a teacher teaching, grass being green, water being wet… It’s just supposed to happen.

There’s no garbage strike in Los Angeles. There is no employee strike at all, and…

The garbage is not being picked up.

For those of you wondering what the City Council is doing, what this crack team of political leaders has found time to focus on, a simple DuckDuckGo search came up with a virtue-signaling plan to ban political contributions from real estate developers (which sounds like a massive First Amendment violation); a declaration of Tuesday as “John Singleton Day,” which sounds like a great idea after the goddamned garbage is picked up; the renaming of a street after the late rapper Nipsey Hussle, which sounds like a great idea after the goddamned garbage is picked up.

Here’s the Twitter feed for the president of the Los Angeles City Council, which looks like a combination of E! The Entertainment Network and an Oberlin College newspaper.

Folks … the garbage in downtown Los Angeles is not being picked up to the point that there’s a typhus epidemic…

But the Council did name a street after Obama.

How hard is it to pick up garbage?

Someone calls and says there’s a pile of garbage on the street, so the city sends a crew out with a truck to clean it up.

What’s the problem? Why is this complicated?

If required, the city hires more guys, buys more trucks, pays more overtime, or works out a deal with the company contracted to pick up trash… This shouldn’t be difficult or controversial because we are talking about picking up garbage.

My wife and I lived in Los Angeles for more than eight years, until the middle of 2011. The city is awful, the people are great, but are these good people now so robotically inclined to vote Democrat that something as basic as garbage pick-up can be botched to this extent without consequence?

We left L.A. because things kept getting worse, not better, and my guess is that a lot of other people did and are doing the same, which leaves behind only those who don’t care enough about garbage and rats and typhus to vote for some common sense, decency, and clean streets.

By the way, here in my current neighborhood in rural North Carolina, we are responsible for hauling away our own trash, and after having lived here 15 years I have never seen so much as one garbage pile, much less a rat.

Follow John Nolte on Twitter @NolteNC. Follow his Facebook Page here.