Timothy Chuang has been in the restaurant business in Flushing for more than 20 years. He said it is hard to do business these days and the city's new sanitation inspection letter grade system is not helping.
The system, approved by the food and community health board in March and effective on July 1, will require food establishments to post letter grades on front windows or entrances easily seen by the public.
This week restaurants that got A's began posting the grades in their windows, and the city launched a website that will present the grades and other information on an establishment's inspection as it becomes available.
Chuang is among the many restaurants owners in Flushing who publicly support the new letter grade system but fear they are at a disadvantage because of preconceptions or misunderstanding about Chinese restaurants. Many are afraid they will get a bad grade, which might deter customers.
Faced with such concerns, the health department said it has made concerted efforts to educate and reach out to restaurant owners in all five boroughs. The agency has held workshops in Chinese, Cantonese, Korean, and Spanish.
"Our inspectors go through extensive training. They are all professionals," said Erin Brady, deputy press secretary at the health department. "They follow very specific protocols, and all restaurants are treated equally."
It is still too early to know how the letter grades will affect the city's 24,000 restaurants and their patrons since it will take more than a year for all the restaurants to get their first report card, according to the health department.
The schedule "depends on each restaurant’s inspection cycle," Brady said. "For example, the ones that were inspected last July are being inspected now."
The letter grade system, similar to the one in Los Angeles, aims to promote sounds sanitary standards for preparing and serving food. According to the health department, the proportion of restaurants in Los Angeles meeting the highest food-safety standards rose from 40 percent to more than 80 percent in seven years, and hospitalizations for food-borne illnesses declined.
"The health department is issuing restaurant letter grades to help consumers make informed choices about where to eat out," said Brady. "Consumer awareness creates a powerful new incentive for restaurants to maintain the highest food safety standards."
At a press conference this week, Mayor Michael Bloomberg said he does not expect to see many low-scoring restaurants. "The best thing that could happen is for everyone to get an A," he said. "That's what we're trying to do and get everyone to that level."
The grades, A, B or C, will correspond to the business's sanitary inspection scores based on a point system, which has been in effect since 2005 and can be viewed on the health department's website. A restaurant will get an A if it receives no more than 13 points for violations, and a B if it gets between 14 and 27 points. A C, the lowest grade given, is assigned if the restaurant gets 28 points or more for violations. The system does not specify how many points will result in the closing of a restaurant. Instead the department will determine that on a case-by-case basis, depending on the severity of the violations.
Some food establishments are not regulated by this new system, including mobile lunch trucks, school cafeterias, soup kitchens and restaurants owned by nonprofit organizations that only serve food to their membership.
Although restaurants getting As, Bs and Cs all are deemed sanitary enough to serve food, the grade determines the frequency of inspection. An A restaurant gets inspected once a year, and a B restaurant gets it every five to seven months. The health department will visit a C restaurant every three to five months.
Some restaurant owners see they system as adding to one the many regulations set by the health department. To Ricky Nacipucha, who owns El Pollito Mexicano restaurant in Park Slope, every inspection means a minimum fine of $200.
"They will look for everything," said Nacipucha, a native of Ecuador. "They give violations for no reason."
If a restaurant is not satisfied with its grade, it can appeal to the health department's administrative tribunal and post a sign that says "Grade Pending."
"I always take pictures when inspectors come so I can fight them in court," said Nacipucha. "At first, I didn't know. But my restaurant friends told me I could appeal. Last time I had seven violations but four were dismissed." He added that he once managed to reduce his fine from $3,800 down to $1,000.
Mario Suvia, a manager at El Pollito Mexicano, added that some inspectors are on a mission to find fault.
"They really want to take points," said Suvia. "They have to find something."
Marilyn Reid, owner of The Islands, a Caribbean restaurant on Washington Avenue in Prospects Heights, said she is confident that her restaurant is clean and her customers are loyal.
"We'll never get a C," said Reid, who came to New York from Jamaica 35 years ago. "Whatever the grade is, it does not reflect the quality of our food."
A search on the health department’s website shows that her restaurant received 20 points of violation when it was inspected in March, which can be converted to a B.
"They are killing me with regulations," added Reid, showing the latest posters on food allergies she said she must post on the wall, which is already covered with various notices from the health department. "I am sure a lot of small business owners will agree with me."
Local community organizations and elected officials have worked with the health department to educate business owners on the new rules. City Councilmember Peter Koo of Flushing, said that business owners must understand and comply with the regulations if they want to conduct business successfully.
"It's not hard to follow the rules," said Koo. "But there are a lot of insensitivities among the inspectors, especially if you don't speak English."
Koo is pushing to form an Asian restaurant alliance and will send his staff members to courses held by the health department so they in turn can help train local restaurant owners and their employees.
In New York City, all restaurant managers must be certified in food protection. A course is available in Chinese, Korean, Spanish and English at the department's health academy. The course lasts 15 hours (three hours a day, Monday through Friday) and costs $114. It also is available online in English, Chinese and Spanish with free access to course material and a $24 fee for the certification exam.
Andrew Rigie, director of operations of New York State Restaurant Association's Greater New York City chapters, said the letter grade is not the most responsible system because the health code is too complex and nuanced for the public to understand what the grades mean.
"A restaurant should either pass or fail the health inspection. You are either sanitary enough to serve the public or you are not," Rigie said.
When asked by reporters, Bloomberg said he would not eat at a favorite restaurant if it got a C. As to one that received a B, he said, "It depends on the food."
Charlie Hauber, a public school teacher from Jackson Heights who frequents Flushing Mall's food court with his family, said the letter grades might influence his decisions only when it comes to a restaurant that he has never visited.
"But if it is a place that I often go to and I see a lot of locals there," said Hauber. "I would still go."
Chris Enright, a tour guide from Park Slope who was enjoying a chicken burrito at El Pollito Mexicano, agreed with Hauber.
"For unfamiliar places, if I have to choose between an A and a B restaurants, I would probably choose the A," said Enright, who had lived in Los Angeles.
"It is hard to run a restaurant. This just adds another stress to them," he said. "But they need to be held to standards."
Larry Tung is a Brooklyn-based journalist and media artist.
New Yorkers know devastation. When the Twin Towers collapsed nine years ago they saw that the blood supplies that might have been desperately needed could dry up in such a calamity. And then there are the disasters outside the five boroughs. When an earthquake rocked Haiti earlier this year, killing hundreds of thousands of people, the Haitian community was struck, too, and New Yorkers lined up to give blood so they could do their share.
Giving blood is one of those selfless acts without which our medical response capabilities would be greatly crippled. In short, it is a public service by citizens. It also is something denied specifically to any man who has had sex with another man.
In the early days of the AIDS epidemic, the federal Food and Drug Administration instituted a ban on gay men with multiple sexual partners donating blood. The agency later expanded that to any male who had slept with a man since 1977.
This federal policy has held fast in the face of changes in our understanding of HIV/AIDS and ability to screen blood. Now, however, movement is building to change the policy.
Put simply, the Food and Drug Administration instituted the ban when knowledge of how HIV/AIDS was communicated was not well known, and AIDS was considered predominantly a "gay" disease.
"It's a broad over-classification and an exclusion of an entire group of people," said Nathan Schaefer, the director of public policy for the Gay Men's Health Crisis, a New York City-based organization providing prevention and care services for people affected by HIV/AIDS. "This is really problematic because the nation's blood supply experiences shortages."
While he did not know of any current blood shortage in the city, Schaefer believes New York is vulnerable. The city faced a blood supply drought in 2007 and could encounter a particularly critical situation in the event of another terrorist attack. Given the many gay people in New York, the national policy of not accepting their blood has a disproportionate effect on the country's biggest city.
Earlier this month, the Health and Human Services Advisory Committee on Blood Safety and Availability voted against changing the policy after hearing lengthy testimony on the issue. The panel reportedly said that current research did not yet justify the lifting of the ban. The Red Cross, which runs blood banks, and other group administering donor programs have suggested men wait a year after having sex with another man to donate blood.
Federal policy on giving blood has evolved over the years. In 1990, for example, the Food and Drug Administration banned all Haitians from giving blood on the grounds that because many Haitian transmitted AIDS through heterosexual intercourse, it was more difficult to determine which Haitian were at high risk for AIDS. A few months later, in the wake of protests by Haitian-Americans, the government reversed the policy.
While he doesn't see a change this year, Schaefer believes the push to alter the policy is greater than it has ever been and is bolstered by the fact that, from a cold medical perspective, screening blood donors through a questioning process has become unnecessary.
"The advancement that we've seen in HIV screening and testing technology has been profound," Schaefer said. "They are able to detect HIV in donations of blood within several days."
The Red Cross uses a dozen tests to determine the donor's blood type and to screen for infectious diseases, including AIDS. "Today's technology makes it almost impossible for HIV to slip through, and the total ban puts a huge burden on blood agencies and the blood supply," said Mark Wainberg, author of a study of the policy, in a prepared statement.
A report by Gay Men's Health Crisis issued this year noted that several countries including France, Argentina, Italy and Japan have reversed similar policies and outlines the shortcomings of the current rules.
"Although the current policy purports to be based upon 'behavior-based' deferrals, the questionnaire [given to prospective donors] does not ask particular questions about an individual's sexual or medical history that would be directly relevant in assessing one's risk of being HIV positive. For example, the policy currently fails to take into account the varying level of risk of HIV infection posed by different sexual practices and does not inquire about the nature of a potential donor's prior practices," the report said.
"Similarly, the current questionnaire does not address a potential donor's consistent and proper condom use, universally agreed to be highly effective in preventing HIV transmission through all types of sexual activity, number of sexual partners or frequency of sexual contact with anonymous partners. This means that gay men who always practice safer sex, or who are in monogamous relationships with partners who are HIV negative, are permanently excluded from eligibility to donate bloodm" the report continues.
Barring gay men from giving blood has a measurable effet on the nation's blood supply,according to a recent report by the Williams Institute for Sexual Orientation Law and Public Policy at UCLA School of Law. The study restimated that the policy bans almost 7 million American men from gving blood and that removing it could add 219,000 pints of blood a year, an increase of about 1.4 percent. Restricing donations only from men who have sex with men within the past year would add 90,000 pints.
But the current ban also has broader social consequencesm according to Schaefer.
For one, it stigmatizes gay sex. Think of this way, Schaefer said: A heterosexual man arrives at a blood donation station. Before being hooked up, a screener asks a few questions, including whether he has ever had intercourse with another man. Because a medical professional has inquired about homosexual activity, this man could walk away with the impression that homosexuality should be considered a public health threat.
Schaefer believes New York’s gay community should get actively involved in this issue. “There would be an opportunity for New York to be very helpful here, investment by the gay and lesbian community to really partner with policymakers in the federal government,” he said.
The movement for change has the support of Christine Quinn, the openly gay City Council speaker, as well as U.S. Reps. Jerrold Nadler and Anthony Weiner.
Aside from the message the ban sends and and the fact that excluding gay men -- or even a man who has simply had one sexual encounter with another man since 1977 -- significantly reduces number of potential donors, the issue often comes down to fairness, as gay men believe it robs them of the right to contribute to society like everyone else.
Schaefer said that anger about the current policy has led to straight people on college campuses boycotting blood drives in solidarity with the gay and lesbian community. "This is really problematic, because what this then means is that not only are the gay and bisexual people not donating blood but a number of eligible young people are not donating blood," he said.
Natalie Hunnicutt’s first assignment as a pest control aide for the city, was, she recalls, also her most memorable: crashing a party of dozens of rodents at a Queens supermarket.
“There were rats scurrying left and right and I just thought â€Oh my goodness,’” the Brooklyn resident said. The pests were leaping over her feet and into a mountain of trash, the result of people using the store’s parking lot as a garbage dump. By the end of the day, Hunnicutt said she and seven of her colleagues removed about 400 bags of garbage from the site.
Hunnicutt continued to clean private and public properties with rodent problems for a little more than two years until the city laid her off in May.
“It hurt,” the 28-year-old said about the pink slip. In her job, she said she was “cleaning up communities and making a difference. I was keeping New York City clean.”
The Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, where Pest Control Services resides, laid off Hunnicutt and 48 of her coworkers. That will save $1.5 million, according to the department. It will leave the department with 41 workers.
Beyond saving money, however, the city says the layoffs are part of a plan to restructure the bureau’s rodent control program. Rather then cleaning lots in response to complaints, the health department has a new project called rodent indexing, which, it says, can control the rat population with fewer workers. Union leaders and some City Council members, though, remain skeptical and warn about a potential vermin crisis in New York.
Rodents are preponderant, albeit unwelcome, residents of the city. New York has consistently been named the city most at risk for rodent infestation, according to several reports released over the years by d-Con. The two research scientists who coauthored the 2009 Rodent Risk Report said with New York’s aging infrastructure and high population density, it is no surprise rodents run rampant here.
“The average person does not see much of the infrastructure, some of which are underground,” Bruce Colvin, a rat expert and one of the report’s authors, said. “But rats see it and use that for travel and movement, such as sewers.”
Earlier this week, the health department released a study showing rats either currently infest or could easily inhabit half of the city’s subway lines. As many as 150 rats can live in the walls of a single station’s refuse room, the study found.
Despite that, health department senior research scientist Robert Corrigan told the Board of Health, subways are not the city’s most rodent-infested places. Parks, vacant lots and construction sites are also havens for the pests, he said.
Over the years, experts have offered widely ranging estimates of the number of rats in the city. While some have put the number at one rat per person -- for a total of about 8 million -- others figure there could be as many as almost 100 million rats. Robert Sullivan, the author of Rats: Observations on the History & Habitat of the City's Most Unwanted Inhabitants, has put the figure far lower.
Whatever the count, most New Yorkers would probably agree that there are too many rats living in their midst. In recent years, the city has tried to stem the number by responding to complaints, often made through the 311 non-emergency hotline. When a rat report is received, Pest Control Services would send out pest-control aides. If they found a problem, property owners could let the aides take care of it for a fee -- shared by the city and the owner.
With rat indexing, however, the health department says it targets rat infestations before a complaint is even made. During an 18-month period in the Bronx – from December 2007 to July 2009 – Pest Control Services inspected 30,000 properties in the borough three times. Combing through neighborhoods block by block, they used hand-held computers and mapping technology to find potential rodent issues.
When they detected a problem, workers gave recommendations to property owners to improve conditions, such as clearing clutter and debris or removing rat enticing garbage. The agency subsequently sent notices to those property owners. If they failed to comply, the agency issued a notice of violation and corrected the issue at the property owner’s expense.
Comparing numbers from the inspectors’ second and third visits, the department said infestations declined in every neighborhood. According to health department numbers, the indexing approach led to an 83 percent decrease in the number of properties with rodents during the Bronx pilot.
Citing its success, the city expanded rodent indexing into Manhattan in January. The health department said further expansion will depend partly on the project’s outcome in Manhattan. The department also said the results of the Bronx pilot program, indicate that the cutbacks in Pest Control Service would not lead to more rat infestations.
Fitz Reid, president of Local 768, a union of health workers, questions that reasoning. He said rat indexing is not proactive, as the city describes it, but “a passive thing [that] does not respond to the people.” He said with fewer workers less attention would be paid to services such as baiting and cleaning.
The department contends it will continue to answer complaints about rats, conduct inspections, perform exterminations and issue violations.
City Council members also have their doubts. Although he commended the department for being proactive with the indexing program, Councilmember James Vacca said he is not convinced the program will work since the health department has yet to give council members information on the impact of laying off pest control workers. Knowing New York’s history with rodents, “I don’t want to cut programs that keep [rats] at bay,” Vacca said.
Councilmember Peter Vallone said even in lean times, services such as pest control should not experience cutbacks.
“I’m glad [the health department is] using technology against an age-old problem, and perhaps that will allow for things to be done more efficiently in the future,” Vallone said. But he wants the health department to remember that “pest control is one of the things government needs to do that the citizens can’t do for themselves. That’s a quality of life issue that we need to provide necessary funding for.”
In theory, said Colvin, proactive approaches such as indexing are the most effective means to control rat infestations. But, he said, other cities that tried such preventative measures find it difficult to secure funds to sustain the effort.
That, he said, is because attention to pest control increases when there is a visible problem. That attention translates to political, and therefore, financial, support for extermination and prevention projects. In New York for example, it took rats overrunning a Taco Bell in Greenwich Village to lead to stricter restaurant inspections.
“There’s a myth that if we’re seeing rats, we don’t have to invest in rat control programs,” Colvin said, “That’s a fallacy that’s gotten cities into trouble. … Rat populations can rebound quickly within six months if risk factors are not continually targeted.”
If Colvin’s reasoning applies here, the health department could find it difficult to get steady funding for rodent indexing in the future. The department said it did not have the cost of the rat indexing program available.
From her experiences as a pest control aide, Hunnicutt said she also is skeptical about how well rat indexing will do.
"It's a given," she said, that reducing the workforce will make the siutation worse "because there's not an efficient amount of workers to get the job done. The work will always grow."
Hunnicutt said she has kept in contact with some of the other laid-off workers. Some of them have moved on, she said, while others are still coping with the job loss. But she said she rebounded pretty quickly. She applied for, and was offered and accepted, a janitorial position at the department of health.
Her first day, June 14, went well, she said, adding “I don’t have to deal with rats!”