LA probe urges stepped-up health checks

Nation's Restaurant News, June 26, 1989 by Richard Martin

LA probe urges stepped-up health checks

LOS ANGELES -- A grand jury probe into routine health inspections of the county's 20,000 restaurants has revealed a wide and purportedly health-threatening gap between state standards and local inspection levels.

The adoption of quicker, more food-focused inspection techniques and the creation of career incentives for the health department's chronically short-handed field staff were among the panel's main recommendations for boosting the annual number of sanitation checks from last year's average of 1.6 per restaurant to the state goal of four a year.

"We are potentially in danger of a [health] crisis developing if this kind of standard remains," grand jury foreman Robert D. Leland said.

The grand jury's report also urged the adoption of a proposed county ordinance that would require a food certification program for restaurant managers. It went on to suggest that once inspection-frequency goals are met, the health department should consider the countywide implementation of an "A-B-C" restaurant-grading system, modeled after one in San Diego County, as an incentive for health code compliance.

A mandatory sanitation and hygiene training program for all restaurant workers, similar to one in neighboring San Bernardino County, was also suggested.

Restaurateurs and industry experts were quick to critize the report's recommendations, especially the proposals for the mandatory certification programs.

"In theory they sound okay, but it's just going to result in more bureaucracy, and it's not going to work," said restaurateur Bob Spivak, co-founder and past president of the Beverly Hills Restaurant Association.

"If the health department doesn't have the manpower to do inspections," asked Spivak, "how is it going to enforce worker certification?"

The grand jury's attention to numerical inspection goals was criticized by a California Restaurant Assocation official, who said a more persuasive methodology would have been to focus on statistical comparisons of restaurant-related health problems in Los Angeles and in those counties that already have certification and grading systems.

"Numbers [of inspections] are so inappropriate when trying to assess a public health issue," said Jo-Linda Thompson, the CRA's government affairs director and general counsel.

However, she backed the general thrust of the report after she was told of a study, conducted last year, of health department statistics that showed there were no recorded inspections whatever for 21 percent of the county's food establishments in 1987.

"That's not only bad public-health policy," Thompson said. "It's unfair competition. Everybody should be inspected."

William Ward, director of the 170-person health department's restaurant inspection bureau, disputed the health safety risk seemingly posed by his staff's inability to meet state inspection goals.

"You're as safe in Los Angeles as you would be in any large metropolitan area," Ward declared. "No [county] in the state is doing four" inspections of each restaurant annually, he asserted, adding that "four is [only] an ideal."