Restaurant safety

Not only do some Maine restaurants go uninspected for years and not only do more than 300,000 people suffer food-borne illnesses here annually and not only are health inspectors given more work than they can accomplish, the solution to this collection of unhealthy conditions is already agreed to by all sides, according to a recent NEWS series. The latest twist, an example of an inspector passing a restaurant that otherwise would have failed to avoid having to do a follow-up check, emphasizes how important it is for the solution to be put into practice.

As reporter Michael O’D. Moore has explained in recent weeks, the number of state food inspectors – they’re called sanitarians – had been cut from 19 to 10 in the early ’90s to save money. Sanitarians are responsible for 3,200 restaurants plus caterers, hotels, motels, public pools, school-lunch programs, children’s camps, tattoo parlor, body-piercing booths – in all more than 9,000 establishments. Instead of restaurants being inspected annually, as required by law, hundreds go two or more years and dozens go more than nine years without an inspection. The Centers for Disease Control figures Maine suffers from 343,000 food-borne illnesses each year.

As the NEWS series showed, it is not necessarily customers who are most concerned about the absence of inspections, but restaurant owners themselves and the restaurant association. Dick Grotten, executive vice president of the Maine Restaurant Association, said, “All it takes is one outbreak of food-borne illness, and it tarnishes the whole industry let alone what it does to franchise brand names.” If a restaurant owner is even close to failing, Mr. Grotten said, “Somebody’s got to go to school. Obviously they don’t understand the issues. My industry has little tolerance for nonprofessionals who don’t know what they are doing.”

His association members share his sentiment. They repeatedly said they learn from the inspections, they think the state should do them more often and they want the unhealthy eateries cleaned up or closed down. If the Department of Human Services, which oversees the inspections, doesn’t see these comments as an invitation to improve the current system, it isn’t paying attention.

The restaurant association says it would support fees to pay for more sanitarians, but wants assurance that the money won’t be swallowed by the General Fund. DHS isn’t going to see a better offer than that, and should propose legislation that would dedicate any new fees to increasing the number of sanitarians. It might even find out whether some of the increased license fees of the early ’90s could be put toward that same purpose.

It’s rare that a state faces a problem of the scale encountered with restaurant inspections and has important constituents agreeing on a solution. Certainly, that takes away any excuse for not solving the problem.