The Minnesota Department of Health and Department of Agriculture are scheduled to assume inspections today, Tuesday, July 9, of restaurants, grocers, pools, hotels and other St. Paul businesses, a responsibility that St. Paul had fulfilled for over 120 years. The state calls it consumer safety. The city calls it a hostile takeover.
State officials say the city last June failed an overall evaluation of its inspections and has been slow in correcting errors such as poorly completed inspections reports and a lack of proper training for employees, including two supervisors who failed or nearly failed standards testing. Those who claim to be in the know suspect that the state wants the revenue that the city makes from licensing fees.
The to and fro has been detailed in this article, here, as well as a prior one, here, regarding St. Paul’s efforts to issue a temporary restraining order against the state “takeover” of city inspections.
Here’s what’s new: Dept. of Agriculture officials say one accusation in the city’s application for a temporary restraining order (TRO) has already been at least partially addressed. The city’s TRO request says that the Minnesota Department of Agriculture recently sought to increase licensing fees by 15 percent so it could add up to four new employees. The department reported being behind on inspections for 45 percent of the retail facilities that it licenses, according to the TRO:
For its 2012-2013 budget, MDA sought to increase licensing fees by 15% so that it could add two to four new full time employees. MDA was not adequately staffed and could not meet statutorily required inspection frequencies.[1] In fact, MDA was behind on inspections for 45% of the retail facilities that it licenses. MDA needed to add two to four more inspectors just to handle its own work.
The Dept. of Ag, however, points to this Feb. 1, 2013 report on retail food handler inspections, which spells out the steps that the Dept. of Ag has taken to correct its inspections backlog.
According to the report, the Dept. of Ag was behind in 32 percent of its retail food inspections in fiscal year 2011. That backlog is now at 25 percent (which is still nothing small, in the Scoop’s humble opinion, but it is well below 45 percent.)
Here’s an email from Margaret Hart, Dept. of Agriculture, with further details about the state backlog:
MDA sought to increase food handler license fees 2 years ago because we analyzed our performance and realized that we were behind in inspections of high risk food facilities. The legislature turned the proposal down but did give us a temporary increase to hire 2 food inspectors because they wanted to see progress in the form of a legislative report before making the appropriation permanent. The report to the legislature detailing our progress can be found at the following URL.
https://www.mda.state.mn.us/sitecore/shell/Controls/Rich%20Text%20Editor/~/media/Files/news/govrelations/legrpt-retailfood.ashxAs you can see in this report, MDA has significantly decreased overdue high risk inspections and this decrease should only accelerate as the inspectors hired two years ago have only recently finished their training (it takes 18 to 24 months to complete basic food inspection training).
The bottom line remains that the state is scheduled to take over inspections of St. Paul establishments Tuesday, July 9, regardless of its own backlog. Minnesota Department of Health officials report that they, too, have a backlog of about 3 percent, but they say their inspectors are “caught up” enough in Rochester, St. Cloud and the metro to redirect some 38 sanitary inspectors and 9 support staff to cover St. Paul until new inspectors can be hired.