The Dirty Kitchens in the County’s Health Department

It aimed for the gut and that’s just where it slammed you, with images of roaches and rat droppings, a freak show of bad personal-hygiene habits, plus food fit for the garbage can being served to paying customers. But far more important was what KCBS’ “Behind Kitchen Doors� series told us about how well the county’s vast and unwieldy Department of Health Services (DHS) is doing its job: The department obviously has its own dirty-kitchen problem regarding its primary mandate of preventing unsanitary conditions and, as with some of those costly and well-regarded restaurants humiliated on the TV evening news, the basic problem looks managerial.

The department’s general manager, Mark Finucane, was out of town when the series popped up on Nov. 16. It certainly didn’t help the department’s image when, in Finucane’s absence, the on-camera response of the acting director of public health, John Schunhoff, favored the restaurant industry: “We have to consider the costs to owners� of providing the mandatory employee-sanitation training that is standard in other Southland counties, he said. But the key issue was, as Supervisor Yvonne Brathwaite Burke put it, that while filthy conditions seemed endemic at thousands of eating places, “which have had [previous] violations and then further violations,� the offending eateries almost never get closed.

The department’s reflex reaction was that KCBS was making a big fuss over a tiny problem. Wrong response. The series had the whole county by its duodenum. All over town, people were telling each other: “Hey, I’ve eaten there.� And throughout the Hall of Administration’s eighth-floor executive suite, supervisors’ phones were ringing off the hook.

The story might have subsided if the DHS officials on hand had quickly agreed there was a problem. But the department’s fumbled defense handed the media another week of high-ratings fun, largely at the expense of county officialdom. Even Finucane eventually took it on the chin, as he gave the camera “I don’t know� answers to queries about whether he’d noted a 1989 county grand-jury audit criticizing restaurant sanitation. Although he had known the KCBS expose was in store, Finucane, according to his spokesman, Fred MacFarlane, was in Washington, D.C. and New York on department business until three days after the series began. After he got back, it seemed like he never caught up.

That audit question wasn’t altogether fair to the DHS chief, however. A 1996 UCLA report had since given the county’s restaurant-sanitation operation a clean bill of health. But perhaps because Finucane has been spending so much of his two years on the job juggling with the federally mandated restructuring of public hospital and clinic services, on TV he came on like a stranger to the entire restaurant-inspection process.

Then it was revealed that the DHS inspection program, which is supposed to be self-supporting by way of its fees, was, in fact, being deprived of its own revenues, $6 million of which had somehow been swept into other portions of the gargantuan $3.3 billion DHS budget. Now it even looked as though the department had willfully divested its leading-edge disease-prevention program in order to support costly clinics and hospitals.

To give Finucane due credit, he’s not dodging the blame: “I am not alibiing. Our attention was elsewhere.� He says that while he did know the dirty-kitchen series was in the works, “I did not think the story would be such a meteor.�

But after he returned, the department got proactive. In the days before Thanksgiving, the reported closures of unsanitary restaurants, most famously, Mayor Richard Riordan’s own Original Pantry, increased to more than 40 and, unlike the Pantry, some of these have not yet reopened. “The county will keep up the pressure,� MacFarlane said. Maybe it will. Finucane’s staff also hammered together a new list of tougher inspection standards that the supervisors passed unanimously, along with the restaurant-personnel training requirement over which Schunhoff had balked. But because it depends on the future creation of specialized, local teaching programs, this latter improvement is likely to be long in coming.

Nevertheless, Finucane promises an immediate “Marshall Plan for restaurant inspections� and unspecified organizational revisions.

On camera, the hapless Schunhoff, who has only had his current job for a year, eventually thanked KCBS for having “pointed out a major problem.� Most restaurant-goers also can be grateful for the station’s Web posting of the cleanliness ratings--good and bad--of nearly 3,000 (at this writing) county restaurants. This particular compilation was not previously available from DHS.

The supervisors, however, might be wondering why it took broadcast journalism to inform top DHS management of a serious failure of its own public-health system. Schunhoff took most of the heat, but the ultimate responsibility is really Finucane’s.

The dirty-kitchen dilemma, in fact, emerged toward the end of a tough year, during which Finucane already has had some problems in maintaining the board’s confidence in his competence. In March, Finucane dragged his feet before telling the supervisors that a shipment of possibly hepatitis-infected strawberries had ended up in the Los Angeles Unified School District’s larders (Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky eventually heard about the berries from Riordan). Last summer, Finucane left the board dissatisfied with what Supervisor Don Knabe, for one, termed some very inconsistent figures on the revenue outcome of the county’s single-most important hospital privatization move: the long-promised sale of the county’s Rancho Los Amigos rehabilitation center (the board decided to keep the facility). And less than a month ago, Finucane set his top department staff at odds with four of the five supervisors by continually promoting a plan for a 750-bed reconstructed County USC Medical Center that was favored only by Supervisor Gloria Molina.

Now, it turns out that Finucane, to all appearances, left California last month without preparing any effective response to the investigative assault on his department that he knew was impending. For half a week, the supervisors to whom he reports were left to answer for him. Next month, these supervisors probably will be surveying his two-year tenure to date. So if one of these days you happen to hear the name Finucane preceded by words like “embattled,� don’t be too surprised.