State restaurant inspectors sometimes boost inspection scores for reasons unrelated to health conditions to ensure establishments don’t fail, according to a Department of Human Services official.

In at least one case last year, an overworked inspector tried to pass a restaurant to avoid a follow-up visit, said Ron McDougal, supervisor of the DHS’ restaurant inspectors.

The case didn’t sit well with DHS Commissioner Kevin Concannon. The state’s 10 inspectors have too much to do, but they still must revisit establishments that fail or score near failure to protect the public health, he said. A decade ago Maine employed 19 inspectors to do the job.

“If they were going to fail they should fail,” Concannon said. “That doesn’t sound like a good reason to me.”

The incident came to light recently after a Bangor Daily News investigation into the DHS’ restaurant inspection program. It found that the inspection team, which is charged with visiting the state’s 9,000 eating establishments at least once a year, had failed to visit 902 establishments for two years or more. Sixty-one had gone uninspected for nine years or more.

Concannon said he plans to review the program’s performance and staffing levels before the next legislative session. He said some of the findings in the Bangor Daily News analysis were troubling, because “Maine is highly dependent on tourism and restaurants are a major component of tourism.”

Included with the Bangor Daily News story was a list of the worst inspections of 2000 as revealed in a DHS database consisting of the results of inspection forms filled out by the state’s sanitarians.

The Log Cabin Restaurant in Newport was on the list. Darren Seaney, an owner of the restaurant, contacted the NEWS, saying inspector Sharron L. Hinckley had told him at the end of the July 10 inspection that his restaurant would pass the review.

Hinckley had originally filled out the form with four critical violations and an FDA score of 66. Failure is three violations and/or a score below 70.

Then she had attempted to change the results by removing two of the critical violations and increasing the FDA score, said McDougal. He said she told him she made the changes so she would not have to go back and inspect the restaurant for a while.

The changes to the inspection form were so difficult to read, however, that the original notations were entered into the state’s database by a clerk, McDougal said.

Hinckley had attempted to eliminate notations indicating a dishwasher wash temperature that registered at 108 degrees, 12 degrees below the 120 degree minimum, and an uncovered fan on a refrigeration unit.

Other violations, which Hinckley made no effort to remove from the form, included improper thawing of frozen food, countertops needing repair, doors that didn’t close tightly enough, an uncovered trash can, and flies in the restaurant.

Efforts to reach Hinckley were unsuccessful.

McDougal said sanitarians need some discretion in deciding whether to give a restaurant a failing grade. For example, if a restaurant promises to fix something soon, a sanitarian may decide to remove it from the form, he said.

McDougal criticized Hinckley’s method of making changes, but said she had not been disciplined.

“She should have X’d them out altogether,” McDougal said. He said a meeting would be held later this month to try to standardize how such changes are indicated on the forms.

Seaney said the inspection was done during a busy time of day, and having a few flies in the restaurant during summer is hard to avoid.

He said that when inspectors do visit the restaurant they are thorough, but he thinks the inspection system has problems in that methods are not uniform.

“If it’s going to be one way for one restaurant it should be that way for all of them,” he said. “I don’t think any of them do it the same way.”

Since the July 10, 2000, inspection, the restaurant has had two satisfactory inspections. In the latest, on April 25, it had a Food and Drug Administration score of 96 out of a possible 100. The restaurant had no critical violations.

There aren’t enough state inspections to protect the reputations of good restaurants from those that stumble on food safety, Seaney said.

“We depend on them to keep the bad ones out,” he said. “They should have more money to do more.”

The DHS’ Concannon said he agrees that there should be some discretion in inspections. But regardless of what actually happened at the Log Cabin, he said he believes inspectors must return more regularly to any establishment that doesn’t have excellent scores. And those that do well can be visited less frequently, but certainly not ignored for a long time, he said.

He said he spent time with sanitarians in Oregon when he was commissioner of that state’s human services department and was surprised to see that some of the biggest hotels had some significant problems that had to be fixed.

“While I believe in the risk-based approach [more frequent visits to lower scoring establishments], even the good ones should be visited. Otherwise you get lethargic,” he said.