A few days before they left for a holiday weekend last spring, inspectors in Berkeley’s Environmental Health Division got a major assignment from their boss.
Twelve people had fallen ill in early May after attending a weekend of wedding events in the South Bay, including one catered by a Berkeley restaurant that had not received a health inspection in four years.
An investigation found the restaurant was not the source of the foodborne illness outbreak. But Environmental Health staff and leaders also knew it was far from alone in having gone years between inspections.
As of this spring, there were dozens of Berkeley food facilities that inspectors hadn’t visited since 2019, if not longer, according to documents obtained by Berkeleyside and a city database. Among them were at least 31 restaurants, plus a slew of coffee shops, bars, delis, grocery stores, health care facilities and senior centers. Restaurants should be inspected three times per year under the city’s policies.
Not long after the wedding outbreak, Berkeley appeared to launch an inspection blitz: on May 24, Environmental Health Manager Ron Torres emailed his staff spreadsheets listing restaurants and businesses that were years overdue for visits. Torres told staff to make inspecting those facilities a priority, and followed up days later to say they could use overtime for the work as part of what he called “the ‘All Hands On Deck’ effort” to visit businesses that hadn’t seen an inspector for years.
City officials say that backlog developed because the Environmental Health Division was short on staff and strained by the COVID-19 pandemic, which meant employees didn’t have time to conduct routine inspections and instead focused on investigating complaints about possible foodborne illnesses.
But a Berkeleyside investigation found deeper problems in the division.
Internal documents showed many of the facilities city staff scrambled to visit earlier this year were due for inspections well before the pandemic began. They had been the responsibility of a single Environmental Health staffer who left for another job in city government in 2019, according to a current division employee, who spoke with a reporter on the condition their name not be used because they feared retribution. The former employee was responsible for inspecting facilities across much of West Berkeley, and the city has not hired a replacement for the position.
Division staff have also long complained about problems with the data systems they use to record and track inspections.
The result of those problems, according to the current employee, was that division leaders appeared to make no effort to cover the former staffer’s area — which Torres referred to in emails as “the Vacant District” — until the wedding outbreak last May.
“That’s the first time they addressed it,” the employee said, adding that there was no urgency to do so “until all of these people got sick.”
City officials, who declined interview requests for this article, disputed that telling of events. They say the division is working to address the inspection backlog, fix problems with its data systems and hire additional staff to stay on top of its workload.
Months after the push to ramp up inspections, though, a city database shows there are still 20 active restaurants in Berkeley that were last inspected in 2019. Meanwhile, Berkeley’s city auditor has launched an inquiry into the restaurant inspection program.
“The pandemic and the public health response were very disruptive to environmental health operations in Berkeley, particularly its food inspection program,” City Manager Dee Williams-Ridley wrote in a memo she sent to the City Council after Berkeleyside inquired about the inspection backlog this fall.
Williams-Ridley acknowledged that “preventive food facilities inspections have lagged,” but stressed in the memo that “there have been no confirmed foodborne illness outbreaks in Berkeley during or subsequent to the COVID-19 pandemic.”
A busy department struggles with staffing
Housed on the second floor of City Hall, the Environmental Health Division has a lot of jobs. Its staff handle noise complaints, manage efforts to prevent lead poisoning, track water quality along the shoreline and regulate businesses such as cannabis dispensaries and tattoo parlors.
They also inspect restaurants and a wide variety of food facilities. Berkeley is one of just four California cities that does its own restaurant inspections, which are typically left to county health departments.
At restaurants, inspectors follow a lengthy checklist that covers everything from the cleanliness of their floors and temperatures in their refrigerators to signs of vermin and whether hand-washing stations are stocked with soap and paper towels. After each visit, inspectors produce a report detailing the number and severity of violations they found. While restaurants aren’t assessed fines for violations, they can be charged if problems require follow-up visits.
Those inspectors, who are classified as Registered Environmental Health Specialists, divide the city into districts and make rounds to businesses in their zone based on potential risks to the public. Berkeley aims to inspect full-service restaurants every four months, city spokesman Matthai Chakko said, while convenience and grocery stores that mainly sell pre-packaged food are due annually.
Reports obtained by Berkeleyside indicate several West Berkeley restaurants that were inspected routinely appeared to fall off the city’s radar around the time the employee responsible for that district left the Environmental Health Division in 2019.
Luca Cucina Italiana, for example, was inspected five times between 2018 and May 2019, then didn’t get another visit from Environmental Health staff until last month. The San Pablo Avenue restaurant has a good health record — the latest inspection did not find any health code violations, according to the city’s publicly accessible database of inspections, and Chakko said there haven’t been any complaints about Luca Cucina Italiana for at least six years.
Chef Luca Rocci didn’t exactly spend the four-and-a-half years between inspections missing Environmental Health staff, he said, since keeping the restaurant afloat through the pandemic and other challenges has been hard enough.
“If they don’t come, it’s better for me,” Rocci said.
In other cases, inspectors returned to restaurants for the first time in years after diners got sick.
City staff visited the high-end waterfront restaurant Skates on the Bay twice in 2018 and twice in 2019, the second time after two diners reported feeling ill. Although it wasn’t clear that Skates was the source of their illness, the inspection uncovered eight health violations, one of which was considered major. In a report, the inspector wrote, “General sanitation and maintenance level does need some improvement.”
But Skates didn’t see health inspectors again for two and a half years — until a patron reported stomach cramps after a meal in June 2022, prompting another visit. Once again, an inspector did not find evidence conclusively linking Skates to the illness.
Keith Beitler, chief operating officer of Skates’ parent company, the Texas-based dining chain Landry’s, downplayed the inspection in a statement, writing, “There were no concerns at the restaurant other than a runny faucet and a hot water issue that were both corrected immediately.”
That isn’t true. The inspection report lists a slew of violations, two considered major, including food that was stored at improper temperatures. A problem with the restaurant’s hot water supply required three follow-up visits from inspectors before it was fixed. In their report, the inspector wrote, “There are a number of violations that would indicate an FBI,” referring to a foodborne illness.
Pandemic added to demand, making inspections a lower priority
COVID-19 added to the Environmental Health Division’s list of responsibilities.
Some of its staff were diverted to work in the emergency office that handled Berkeley’s pandemic response; meanwhile, in-person restaurant inspections were put on hold amid lockdowns.
“The Environmental Health Division has continued to prioritize staff towards addressing the greatest health and safety risks,” Chakko wrote in response to questions from Berkeleyside. “At the beginning of the pandemic, that meant deploying staff to help with COVID-19 response. With reduced budgets and staff, that also meant prioritizing complaint response over routine inspections.”
All of the division’s work now falls on just eight active employees, out of a budgeted staff of 13; four positions are vacant, and a fifth employee is on medical leave. High vacancy rates are a widespread problem in Berkeley’s city government that affect departments from public works to police, and Williams-Ridley has launched several initiatives to help the city better recruit and retain employees.
The pandemic and the public health response were very disruptive to environmental health operations in Berkeley, particularly its food inspection program.
City Manager Dee Williams-Ridley
According to the source within the division, inspectors went back to doing routine restaurant inspections in most of Berkeley as pandemic restrictions eased in 2021 — but not in the area covered by the former division employee who had left two years earlier.
Williams-Ridley said Environmental Health staff began a “concerted effort” to identify restaurants that were overdue for inspections in early 2023. Still, the division does not appear to have taken further steps to address the inspection backlog until the wedding outbreak in May.
The Berkeley restaurant that came under scrutiny for the outbreak was docked for several minor violations in an inspection days after guests reported feeling ill, the restaurant’s first since May 2019. But Chakko said the investigation found the restaurant, which catered a smaller rehearsal dinner ahead of the wedding, was not responsible for the illnesses. Berkeleyside is not naming the restaurant because it was not at fault for the outbreak, and was not cited for any major violations.
Williams-Ridley wrote in her memo that the city has been trying to hire workers to fill two vacant registered environmental health specialist positions, which she noted “require very specific credentials,” but hasn’t succeeded. Berkeley recently posted the positions again on its city jobs board.
“Many other California environmental health jurisdictions are experiencing struggles with hiring that are similar to Berkeley’s,” Williams-Ridley wrote.
I’m spending hours just investigating what the issues are. We need a body in here!
Berkeley Environmental health Division employee
The city manager also blamed the inspection backlog partly on what she described as “tremendous increases” in noise and “vector control” complaints — reports of rodents or other pests that can spread disease — the division has handled in recent years. Data provided by the city to back up that claim paint a mixed picture; while the number of vector control cases in 2021 and 2022 were up 17% compared to 2018 and 2019, noise complaints were down 13%. Chakko said those figures “do not tell the whole story” since noise complaints may require repeat visits.
Workload and data systems strain division employees
The “‘All Hands on Deck’ effort” Torres described having staff inspect dozens of facilities — on top of their usual duties — has further strained the division, according to the employee who spoke with Berkeleyside.
“Morale is a huge issue,” the source said. “The workload is a huge issue.”
Chakko disagreed, writing, “The issue of morale is experienced differently among individual employees,” and that the low morale the employee described “is not the case across the division as a whole.”
But emails obtained by Berkeleyside show staff in the division have complained among themselves, to Torres and to higher-ups in City Hall about their workloads, the slow pace of filling vacancies and the data system they use to track and manage food facility inspections.
One employee wrote in an email to Torres last April that problems with the database, called Envision, were “taking up the majority of my day.”
“Each Food inspector has so many questions from their facilities that I can’t keep up,” the employee wrote. “I’m spending hours just investigating what the issues are. We need a body in here!”
When Torres sent out the spreadsheets of facilities that were overdue for visits last spring, employees noticed they included several restaurants that had gone out of business years earlier but are still listed in the city’s databases. At one point during the reporting process for this story, Torres told Berkeleyside he had to search by hand through restaurants’ files for inspection reports because some weren’t showing up in the division’s software system.
Berkeley also makes little information available on a publicly accessible database of food facility inspections. The site only lists whether inspectors found certain types of health code violations, with no option for users to access detailed inspection reports or more specific information about the violations. Santa Clara County, by comparison, has a website and mobile app that display the numerical scores inspectors assigned to each restaurant, and link to copies of full inspection reports.
Until recently, much of the Berkeley site’s information was also badly outdated. For instance, someone who tried to look up Chez Panisse’s record this fall was shown the results of an inspection from 2015, even though the restaurant had been inspected in April. The database was updated last month after Berkeleyside inquired about the outdated information.
Chakko acknowledged there are problems with the division’s internal and public-facing data systems. He said the city is working “to make needed improvements to the functionality of Envision,” and to resolve bugs affecting the public database.
