The Daily Agenda: As if health inspection stories weren't hard enough

Pima County changed how they grade facilities ... Harder now to find facilities that fail inspections ... Wadsack recall effort wraps up.

A few weeks ago, a Tucson Agenda subscriber posed a question on social media that piqued our interest.

“When is the last time you read about health inspections at nursing homes, day-care centers or restaurants?”

We thought about it, and quite honestly, it has been years. Certainly not since the start of the pandemic and maybe even longer.

Reporting on health inspections is kind of a drag — it’s time-consuming, gross and you regularly get yelled at by angry restaurant managers when calling to seek comment. But it’s important, especially when it comes to special facilities like nursing homes, day-care centers and school cafeterias.

So we decided to look into it and see if we could easily integrate health inspection coverage into our routine in a way that fits into our “work smarter, not harder” model. Turns out, your probably not seeing restaurant inspection news because the process is even more time-consuming than it used to be thanks to county technology changes.

In the past, the Pima County Health Department had a comprehensive database of inspections, searchable by name, address, facility type and rating or grade. That made it easy to find restaurants and food service facilities that received bad ratings.

Caitlin covered health inspections back in the day, and she would check the database once a month, file a public records request for inspection reports for the restaurants that received a “provisional” or “fail” rating and make those dreaded calls for comment.

But when the county health department switched to a new application and website provider, Hedgehog Environmental Health, in November of 2019, it meant reporters and diners could no longer simply filter for restaurants with failing grades.

It’s worth noting that the new system came online a few months after county announced it would be “easing up a bit on restaurant owners” and changing the restaurant inspection scoring process. Now, violations that don’t present the risk of food borne illness receive less weight when calculating inspection scores, but extra weight is given to violations that raise the risk of diners getting ill, as reporter Carol Ann Alaimo wrote at the time.

Sure, the Hedgehog website is nice looking and it’s much more high-tech than the old database, with the ability to view facilities on a table or map.

Every day, we try to make the Tucson Agenda nice looking, too. Imagine how good we could make it look if we had more paid subscribers.

But without the ability to search by rating, a person has to review each individual inspection to find the ones that are problematic. Between 20 and 40 inspections happen every day, so you’d have to review upwards of 1,200 inspections every month.

That certainly doesn’t fit into the “work smarter” model, so we reached out to the county to see if there’s an easier way.

“The best way for public access to inspections sorted by rating would be to submit a public records request,” she wrote in an email.

Unfortunately, that can be very time-consuming.

Caitlin filed a records request Monday for inspection reports for food service facility inspections that resulted in ratings of “needs improvements,” “probation” and “imminent health hazards,” and for re-inspections that resulted in a “fail” rating. We’ll report back on what we find.

Until then, maybe check out that Hedgehog website before you head to your favorite restaurant or enroll your child in a new daycare. But you’ll have to look harder, and you might not like what you find.

That’s a wrap: The “Sack Wadsack” effort to recall state Sen. Justine Wadsack is wrapping up. All that’s left is to see whether they gathered enough signatures, the Tucson Sentinel’s Jim Nintzel reports. Wadsack, the first-term Republican representing North Tucson’s Legislative District 17, would face a special election next spring if the recall effort gathered about 31,000 valid signatures from voters in her district by 5 p.m. today. Fittingly, backers of the recall effort celebrated with a drag show, one of Wadsack’s legislative targets.

Case dismissed: A federal judge in Tucson dismissed a lawsuit that claimed the city’s sweeps of homeless encampments were unconstitutional, Capitol Media Services’ Howard Fischer reports. The judge noted that neither side had filed any documents in the case since February. Meanwhile, a similar lawsuit is unfolding in federal court in Phoenix.

At the Tucson Agenda, we’ll never leave you hanging for months on end. We’ll be working our tails off every day bringing you the news.

Water woes: Environmental advocates are tracking streams in the area where the Hermosa Mine Project is planned near Patagonia, the Tucson Sentinel’s Daniel Shailer reports. Soon, the mine operators are going to start pumping water out of mine shafts and releasing it into Harshaw Creek.

“The science, said [advocate Sarah] Truebe, is pretty simple. ‘If you pull down the groundwater it will dry out all the springs.’ With the springs go a lifeline for aquatic plants and endangered species, and potentially the drinking water for over 1,000 residents in the Patagonia area,” Shailer reported.

What to do with a budget surplus: Pima County supervisors will consider putting part of the expected budget surplus into affordable housing at their meeting today. District 2 Supervisor Matt Heinz put the item on the meeting agenda.

“We MUST accelerate the building and preservation of affordable housing units across the county if we have any hope of maintaining a community in which all people can afford to live and raise a family,” Heinz wrote.

Weigh in on parks: The city’s Parks and Recreations Department’s community needs survey is open through Sept. 30, allowing residents to weight in on recreation and leisure activities. Information gathered will be used to help develop a long-term strategy to develop and support social, recreational and cultural opportunities that are available to all community members.

Caitlin and Arizona Agenda co-founder Rachel Leingang’s collaboration about a statewide program that supports expectant and new mothers took home first place honors in the Arizona Newspaper Association’s Better Newspapers Contest. The article ran in both the Star and the Agenda and was the first of two solutions stories that Caitlin and Rachel co-authored. You can read the award-winning story, Arizona program hopes to be nationwide model for healthy babies, here, and check out their other collaboration here.