Good background article by Catherine Viglienzoni in yesterday's Mecury News about Santa Cruz County's 3 year old program to put restaurant health inspections online.
SCC Environmental Health Services - Consumer Protection Program does the restaurant inspections about twice a year. Los Angeles gives a letter grade (A, B, C) which must be posted in the restaurant's window, but since most score A there seems to be either grade inflation or LA has extremely clean restaurants. SCC reports show the type of violation and history.
How difficult would be to grade Santa Cruz restaurants in other categories: nutrition claims (Is 'frozen desert' really yogurt?), sustainability, energy efficiency, etc.
SCC Environmental Health Services - Consumer Protection Program, Restaurants
Here's the restaurant inspection list in .pdf format.
Looks like Zoccoli's, Woodstock, Marianne's Ice Cream and others have had some vermon problems.
Thanks to John Hodges, the county's consumer protection program manager, Robert Smith who manages the websites and the invisible inspectors who have tough job.
Full Mecury article is here.
Monday, August 31, 2009
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Received a nice note from John Hodges:
ReplyDeleteGreen, Yellow or Red?
Thank you for the kind remarks, and for the blog information. For a small county, this department gets quite a bit done. For food facility inspections, we have 4 1/2 FTE's that also inspect pools, spas, and respond to complaints for general sanitation. Of course, these are good people and motivated professionals.
I agree that the results of a "grading" system can gravitate to subjective "over rating," due to the human factor - but this is more likely in a large metropolitan area such as LA. Within smaller jurisdictions, I believe this "making it all look good" is less likely to occur.
Our thought is that there is first a go-no go or binary decision...either the facility meets the minimal requirements to be open, or it should be closed. There can be some discrepancies or violations at a business but a restaurant would be ordered closed when any violation presents an imminent risk to public health, or when there is such a preponderance of minor and general violations that overall risk exceeds community expectations, and/or our local mandate to "promote, prevent, and protect" public health.
Other schemes have been proposed for making the public aware of just how compliant a restaurant is with health requirements. California Health & Safety Code section 113725.1 requires that a permitted food facility must have a copy of the most recent routine inspection on hand, and readily available, for review by the public. However, most facilities are rarely asked by customers to be shown the report.
Rather than an alphanumeric score, some CA counties (Ventura, Sacramento) have moved to a "traffic signal" scheme, with the ratings "Green, Yellow, or Red" posted in public view at the main entrance. Sacramento County has a much larger and better funded EH organization than Santa Cruz - and they have established a very good program of grading restaurants and other food facilities, plus have online inspection results. We have been looking at the program they have implemented, as well as some other methods. Here is a link to their site:
http://www.emd.saccounty.net/EH/EMDFoodProtect.htm
Regards, JH
John Hodges, REHS
EH Program Manager
Environmental Health Services
Co. of Santa Cruz Health Services Agency