Stamford restaurant inspections may not be online until next year

Have been offline since 2020 due to system glitches

For more than a decade, health inspection reports of Stamford restaurants were posted on the city’s website, giving residents information about which eateries were the best maintained and which ones struggled to meet standards.

STAMFORD — Health inspection reports of Stamford restaurants have not been viewable online for over two years, and will likely not reappear until 2024 at the earliest.

The reason for the delay is a series of technical difficulties that culminated in representatives from ViewPoint, the city’s cloud system, telling city employees that they were unable to convert the hundreds of reports created each year into a publicly accessible online database.

The information came after months of city officials being told the issue was being worked on, said Raquelle Early, administrative supervisor of health for the city’s Department of Health.

“We were promised that we were going to have our food inspections be (accessible) to the public,” she said Aug. 4.

The ViewPoint Cloud system was launched in October 2020 and the decision to switch to it from the previous system, called Access, was made by the administration of former mayor David Martin.

For more than a decade, health inspection reports of Stamford restaurants were posted on the city’s website, giving residents information about which eateries were the best maintained and which ones struggled to meet standards. Each restaurant was given a grade based on its most recent report. Users could click on each business to see why it received a particular grade as well as view earlier reports.

Previously, when restaurants failed an inspection, which are conducted without warning, they

were reinspected about two weeks later. If the restaurant failed again, the owner was fined $150 and was required to appear before the city’s health inspection division to discuss each infraction and establish a plan to address the issues.

A third violation meant the business was subject to closure, at the discretion of the director of health. If the restaurant was shuttered, the owner had to pay $300 to reopen.

But the state recently released new guidelines for inspections that does not label any eatery as passing or failing.

The new system does not even provide a number score. Instead, violations are categorized as “priority,” “priority foundation” and “core.” Those with “priority” violations must be inspected again within 72 hours, while “priority foundation” violations must be reassessed within 10 days and “core” violations in 90 days.

Early said egregious violations can result in a restaurant owner being asked to voluntarily shut down until the violation is resolved. If the owner refuses, the city’s health director can issue an order to close the business, which the owner could appeal to the state within 48 hours of the issuance of the order. If the state sides with the city, the business could be shuttered.

But Stamford residents have been mostly in the dark about which restaurants are even at risk of closing since no reports have been posted online since the site went dormant around April 2021.

After an inquiry from The Stamford Advocate in April 2022 about the year-long lack of new health reports, the inspections website was taken down, with an error message that read “service unavailable.” The website has remained unavailable ever since.

All along, the website problems have not interfered with the work of the health department, said Lauren Meyer of Mayor Caroline Simmons’ office, as inspectors have continued to conduct routine inspections of restaurants.

In fact, the switch to ViewPoint was actually seen as a major improvement for the Department of Health, Early said, as inspections could be put into the system digitally for the first time without using paper.

But Early said the new system has presented other interface challenges, such as difficulty in searching for reports, among other issues.

That’s one of the reasons the Department of Health is moving to yet another vendor, called OPAL, or Online Permitting and Licensing. Early said it is highly unlikely that inspections will be online by the end of the year with the new system. She said 2024 is a more realistic goal.

Currently, if someone wants to view a specific inspection report, they need to fill out a Freedom of Information Act request and send it to the Department of Health.

Early recognized that this is far from an ideal solution.

“Why should a resident or why should a visitor of the Stamford community have to (submit) a Freedom of Information Act (request) to do something that has been historically available to them?” she asked.

Early said the department is striving to get the information online for residents to easily view.

“We’re trying to be as transparent as possible,” she said.