County showing restaurant health inspection reports online
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The Allegheny County Health Department has made good on a pledge to keep restaurant inspection reports available online going back at least one year.
That means the public will be able to see if inspections are being performed on time, and whether restaurants in the county have a history of problems.
When the department began posting restaurant inspections on its website in July, the policy was to display only one report per restaurant. When a new report came in -- even if it was a follow-up inspection made to ensure that previous food safety violations had been corrected -- the old report got bumped off.
That policy effectively obscured some of the worst food handling violations that inspectors uncovered.
And because the dates of any previous inspections were removed, people could not tell if inspections were on time. (Most restaurants are supposed to be inspected once a year.)
After the Post-Gazette pointed out the flaws last year, health department Director Bruce Dixon promised to change the online system sometime early this year.
The department began showing multiple inspection reports online in February, spokesman Guillermo Cole said Tuesday. The county Board of Health will have to decide how long the reports will stay there before being removed, Mr. Cole said.
The Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture, which inspects food facilities across the state in counties and municipalities that do not have their own inspection programs, retains at least two years' worth of inspection reports on its website. It started posting the reports online in 2007.
Allegheny County is in the process of overhauling its inspection program so that it can begin assigning restaurants percentage scores and letter grades based on results of their inspections.
First Published March 30, 2011 12:00 am
