A lot on their plate

Unfilled jobs make it hard for county to keep up with restaurant inspections

One result of the Pittsburgh region’s historically low unemployment rate has been less help in restaurant kitchens — not preparing meals, but inspecting them.

The Allegheny County Health Department last week acknowledged that a manpower shortage is making it hard to keep up with annual restaurant inspections.

That has meant that numerous busy restaurants and other large food venues aren’t getting their usual checkups.

“It simply is difficult to retain our inspectors when there are other often better-paying positions out there,” said Lee Harrison, a physician and chairman of the Allegheny County Board of Health, which keeps tabs on the health department. “In the last few years, the unemployment rate has been so low, it’s been tough to fill the spots.”

Late inspections have been a chronic problem for the department in recent years.

Several years ago, the county added a handful of new inspector positions to help ease the workload and make it easier to ensure that inspections were done on time.

Now the problem is keeping those positions filled.

Currently there are three openings among 20 food inspector positions covering some 8,500 food facilities. The department trains new inspectors, who must have a bachelor’s degree, live in Allegheny County and use their own vehicle to travel to various food facilities around the county.

Starting pay for the position is $31,366 annually, which rises to $32,921 with a satisfactory performance evaluation after one year.

Dr. Harrison said it could be time for a bump in pay but noted some obstacles.

“I think it’s something worth discussing,” he said. “We’d have to try to figure out a way to make that happen. But it’s tough when talking about [spending] public funds.”

While Allegheny County and the counties of Bucks, Chester, Erie, Montgomery and Philadelphia all handle their own restaurant inspections, the Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture conducts inspections in many other jurisdictions across the state that do not have inspection programs.

The state has 69 food inspectors responsible for nearly 44,000 facilities statewide. Starting pay is $38,688 a year.

When asked if higher salaries might fix the problem of high turnover, county manager William D. McKain noted that the job of food inspector was entry-level, and that “people in these roles often take the opportunity to move to positions with greater opportunity.”

He said he was confident that the leadership of the health department “understands that this is an important function of the department, and that they are focused on ensuring that they have the appropriate personnel and resources in place.”

Dr. Harrison said keeping up with inspections “is a chronic problem that doesn’t have an easy solution.”

He said the health department has increased help-wanted advertisements through Facebook and Twitter to fill the open jobs quickly.

“We’ve always taken restaurant inspections seriously,” he said. “We are doing our best to get these positions filled.”