Last year, Berkeley failed to inspect nearly half of the city’s food facilities, including 193 restaurants, according to a new auditor’s report.
In the rest of Alameda County, only 3% of facilities went uninspected. Berkeley is one of just four California cities that conducts its own food inspections, typically done by counties.
All of Berkeley’s food facilities must be inspected at least annually, with higher-risk facilities such as sit-down restaurants, caterers and nursing facilities required to be inspected three times per year. The report says 44% of the city’s high- and very-high-risk facilities were never inspected in 2023 and fewer than 1% received all three mandated inspections.
The report also found that just 26% of foodborne illness complaints were responded to on time — within a one-day period — and more than a quarter were not responded to within five days.
City spokesperson Maitée Rossoukhi told Berkeleyside that while there have been no foodborne illness outbreaks in any Berkeley restaurant since 2016, the audit’s findings were “concerning” and the city was working to address them.
The audit comes seven months after Berkeleyside published an investigation into the city’s Environmental Health Division, which revealed the city’s failings to regularly inspect restaurants, respond to foodborne illness complaints and maintain a usable public inspection database. Many of Berkeleyside’s findings are backed up by the audit.
Read the Berkeley City Auditor’s report on the city’s restaurant inspections program
The audit cites chronic short-staffing in the city’s Environmental Health Division — where staff are also tasked with responding to vector control issues and noise complaints and ensuring that swimming pools, tattoo parlors, tobacco and cannabis stores are safe — as the main reason for Berkeley’s failures.
In 2023, Berkeley had just three full-time food inspectors, each tasked with conducting between 549 and 589 routine inspections. Under the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s workload standards, Berkeley should have at least seven inspectors, with their workloads limited to 280-320 inspections annually.
The city says it fell behind on restaurant inspections because the pandemic shifted staff’s priorities, and that it expects to complete all inspections by October. The number of remaining uninspected facilities had been reduced from 418 to 260 as of June 20.
The audit says the citywide staffing crisis is not entirely to blame for the division’s troubles. “City leadership did not consistently recruit for budgeted positions despite persistent vacancies,” the report says, noting that the division is in its fifth year without a supervisor responsible for giving assignments to inspectors — taking“no action” to recruit a supervisor since 2019, the year before the pandemic began.
A food safety inspector position has also been left vacant since 2019. The city says a conditional offer has recently been made for the position and it will begin recruiting for the supervisor role once the inspector position is “fully onboarded.”
The audit says the city’s online food inspection data is hard to access and sometimes gives “the wrong impression that a facility had no violations during the last inspection when in fact it did.” The city’s inspection database also has consequential omissions; two preschools excluded from the database in 2023 were not inspected.
The report also recommends the city create an online search tool for food inspections, similar to Alameda County, and have restaurants display placards showing their food safety scores, as the county has required for over a decade. (In 2012, the city explored implementing placards, but the idea never came to fruition.)
In its response to the draft audit recommendations, the division’s leaders wrote in the audit that they hoped to create a better system for sharing food inspection information online in the future, but in the short term were “considering disabling” the current online feature on the city’s Open Data portal.
The audit pushes back on this proposal. “This response would decrease transparency of information and reduce public knowledge about the state of restaurant inspections,” the report says. “The Division did not provide any indication that adding the required information — such as violations related to improper cooling of potentially hazardous foods — would not be feasible.”
The audit also raised questions about the environmental health division’s financial accounting.
During the audit process, the city’s Audit Office repeatedly requested food inspection program revenues and expenditures, but were told by division leaders that the information was not tracked.
Not until after the Audit Office shared a draft of the audit with the division for comment, did the division’s leaders respond, writing they were “confident” the sum total of food inspection revenues is being spent on food program administration, as revenue from health inspection fees “only covers an average 60% of expenditures” associated with administering the Environmental Health Division’s inspections.
The Audit Office said since this information was provided late, it could not be verified. If true, it would mean a significant difference from how things work in Alameda County and the city of Pasadena, which also conducts its own food inspections. In those places, “food inspection program revenues cover most program costs,” the audit says.
The audit’s primary recommendation for the division is to prioritize filling staff vacancies. Other recommendations include creating a trainee program to build a pipeline into food inspector roles and better tracking food inspection program revenues and expenditures to ensure food inspection revenues are actually being spent on food program administration.
Berkeley City Council plans to discuss the audit on July 30. The city manager is asked to report back to the Audit Office by January and annually afterward until the recommendations are implemented.
