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LA County Health Officials Want to Make Restaurant Grading System Tougher

Published on Friday, August 21, 2015 | 12:25 pm
 

Officials at the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health are now recommending an overhaul of the health grading system for restaurants, following a report by the Los Angeles News Group that many of these public eating places were given high grades despite having incurred serious health violations.

The officials, in a report to the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors, want a change in the points system so that restaurants cannot receive an A health grade when two major health code violations are observed during inspections, or when the restaurants are closed as a result of the inspection.

Under county Public Health Department standards, food facilities that are rated A or B can remain open, while C-rated facilities need to comply immediately with specific health or safety requirements to continue to operate.

Restaurants that rate lower than C receive specific scores deducted from an initial 100 points at the start of the inspection and are immediately closed.

Pasadena and the cities of Vernon and Long Beach use inspection rating systems that differ from the county standards.

In Pasadena, Public Health Department inspectors use a Retail Food Field Inspection Guide from which a food facility could be rated as Pass, Conditional Pass, or Closed depending on the points obtained.

The media report, compiling data from a review of 21 months of public health inspections, included instances when restaurants that were found to have had live rodent infestations or had no hot water at the time of the inspection still received A ratings afterwards.

In some cases, restaurants with rodent or cockroach infestations received A grades on the same day they were closed.

“There appears to be an inconsistency,” Angelo Bellomo, director of the county’s Environmental Health Division, told the San Gabriel Valley Tribune. “How could (a restaurant) have had a cockroach infestation that closed them down and yet they received an A on their grade card?”

LA Public Health officials outlined for the Board of Supervisors the current problems in the grading system that has been in use for 17 years and recommended potential solutions so that restaurants with major health threats should not be allowed to operate.

Restaurant inspections are conducted by the department’s Environmental Health Division, which conducts more than 55,000 inspections annually in 39,000 retail food facilities throughout the county.

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