FARMINGTON -- Davis County restaurant patrons will have to wait at least three months before the Board of Health decides whether to publish food inspection reports. After a presentation and a short discussion, the board voted to form a committee to investigate the pros and cons of placing such information on the Web. The issue has netted much discussion and several editorials in area newspapers, but anyone who thought there might be a decision made during Tuesday's Board of Health meeting will have to wait. Delane McGarvey, director of the Division of Environmental Health for Davis County reported that in Utah, only the Salt Lake Valley Health Department posts any information on restaurants. And it only lists those restaurants which have had some enforcement action taken.

But nationally, information on restaurants run the gamut from virtually none to quite inclusive reports which give every aspect of an inspection.

The problem is that often the reports are not kept current, and if that happened in Davis County, it could lead to misinformation or even to liability issues for the county, said health director Lewis Garrett "It's unfair to keep the old data on the site."

Currently, the Davis County Health Department has information on restaurants which have had problems with inspections available for public perusal, but restaurant patrons must go into the health department or call to get the information.

The department only gets 15-20 inquiries a year, McGarvey said, but it's one of the first things nearly everyone asks about, when they meet anyone who works for the department, "So it's on people's minds," he said.

McGarvey said there are a wide range of violations within the industry, ranging from those which can be corrected in a matter of hours or days, to those which are serious, but do not warrant closing an establishment, to those which must be closed for a few hours or as long as 30 days. Others with extreme violations and a failure to comply with notice to correct the violation are shut down.

McGarvey reiterated the importance of keeping the information up to date, because if a restaurant has had problems for some time, and then comes under new management, it's unfair to the new management to have the restaurant seen as having problems.





Davis County Commissioner Carol Page questioned how much work it would take to keep the site updated.

It's among the issues to be discussed by the committee, which will include a representative of the Utah Restaurant Association.

mwilliams@davisclipper.com