City to beef up restaurant inspections
Monday, August 18, 2014 by Jenny Blair
Eight more sanitarians and support staff will soon turn out to inspect Austin restaurants for health violations. According to Carlos Rivera, director of Austin/Travis County Health and Human Services, national standards call for each “fixed food establishment” to receive two inspections a year. Austin’s restaurants are only logging about 1.6, in part because the number of restaurants has jumped 12 percent since 2009. So HHS is allotting $900,000 of its proposed $73 million budget in fiscal year 2015 in order to boost that rate, Rivera told the City Council at Wednesday’s budget work session. He told them that the city’s food poisoning rates aren’t clear, since many cases go unreported.
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