City Health Official Admits Restaurant Inspections Fall Short

 
by KYW's Mike Dunn

 

Philadelphia’s health commissioner admitted to a City Council committee on Wednesday that to reach FDA standards on restaurant inspections in the city, she’d need to nearly double the number of inspectors.

 

At Wednesday's hearing on the cleanliness of the city's restaurants, community members like Tracey Gordon complained to Council that smaller restaurants and stop-n-gos are not clean even when they are inspected:

  

“There is no way that the Health Department is regulating these stores.  They are dirty.  You only have to go into the store.  You could be Stevie Wonder-blind and see how filthy dirty these establishments are.”

And she says if dirty establishments are passing inspections, then the city's inspectors aren't doing their jobs.

 

Health commissioner Carmen Paris (right) said she currently has 32 inspectors, with plans to hire five more, to look at more than 11,000 food establishments citywide. 

 

She says they’re able to hit each one almost annually.  But the department plans to adopt stricter FDA standards that she says would require at least 60 inspectors, and she admitted she does not know when that hiring will happen.

 

City Council was putting the cleanliness of Philadelphia restaurants under the microscope after a Philadelphia Inquirer report last June that inspectors only get to each restaurant in the city about once every 15 months.

 

That prompted councilwoman Marion Tasco to schedule Wednesday’s hearing.  She says complaints about dirty eateries don’t always go to the city:

“(Customers who get sick) tend to go to their lawyer and file a lawsuit against the restaurant, so the city needs to know and have a mechanism and a process for identifying when that happens.”

Other major cities require that each restaurant be inspected annually, or in some cities as often as two or four times a year.