Members of the San Francisco Health Commission unanimously approved a resolution today to hire more health inspectors and to render the health inspection process itself less mysterious.
The resolution is the product of increased scrutiny recently directed toward a program that has battled staffing shortages and criticism for lack of public disclosure. But notably absent from the resolution was a recommendation that president James Illig proposed an hour before to the Community and Public Health Committee: to require food establishments to “post the most current inspection scorecard in a window or other locations visible to the public.”
Instead, the resolution included a request for bi-annual reports outlining the progress of the city’s goal to routinely inspect restaurants twice per year, another request for more comprehensive cost reports (there’s some uncertainty as to whether the fees gathered by health inspections cover the cost of running the department), an urging to fill health inspector positions that have been vacant for months and an overhaul of the Department of Public Health’s web site to allow the public easy access to current and past restaurant inspection reports.
Restaurants are already required to post their health inspection reports, said Richard Lee, the Department of Public Health’s Director of Environmental Health and Regulatory Programs. But the report is often posted in hard to find places, if at all. And there is no requirement that they post the green card accompanying the report that shows the restaurant’s most recent inspection score.
The Community and Public Health Committee concluded that it would investigate a change to a letter grade system (similar to that used in Los Angeles and New York) in January, when a new Board of Supervisors is seated.
The idea of implementing a letter-grade system is nothing new. In 2004, lame-duck Supervisor Chris Daly advocated the city adopt a letter-grade system. The executive director of the Golden Gate Restaurant Association (GGRA) at the time called the grades “scarlet letters,” a sentiment that is still echoed today.
The current executive director of the restaurant association, Kevin Westlye, said in an interview last week that he supported the department’s new policy to post public notices whenever a restaurant is closed, adding in an email later that his association’s position is to support the Department of Public Health in assuring the public safety for all diners.
But Westlye said that the time of day and even the day of the week a restaurant is inspected can play a huge role in what score it gets. A restaurant inspected in the midst of a lunch rush can have a categorically different score than a similarly maintained facility that only opens for dinner, Westlye noted, because restaurants are measured, in part, by the temperatures food is cooked and stored. Also, restaurants that receive a low score on their inspection reports can only have their score changed during the next random inspection — even if the violations marked on its report were addressed and abated immediately.
Unless these factors are taken into account, Westlye says, “there will always be an inconsistency” in scores.
