Column: Monroe County provides inspection data to chew on, food for thought, a buffet of information
Monroe County has not released a monthly report of food inspection results for August 2024.
Instead of monthly summaries, the health department is now releasing the results of individual reports as part of a dynamic map, on a more or less rolling basis. Check it out: food inspection reports map.
This is good news. It’s a solid step forward.
For journalists, it’s a dramatic improvement. Gone is the drudgery of parsing the monthly .pdf files into a structured dataset, then geocoding the addresses so that the food inspection results can be plotted out on a map for readers. All the data is already sitting there, plotted out on the map.
Journalists can spend their time answering longitudinal questions, like: Does any restaurant that was in operation starting in 2011 have a record of inspections that is unblemished with any critical violations since then?
Yes.
Here’s the list of 21 restaurants that The B Square was able to find with no critical violations since 2011: Aldi #30; Bake Me A Cake Etc; Black’s Mercantile; Butler Winery #1; Butler Winery #2; Community Kitchen Express; Cook Amer DC; CVS Pharmacy #6697; CVS Pharmacy #3195; CVS Pharmacy #8671; Family Dollar #25431; Hartzell’s Ice Cream; Kady Lynn Auctions; Olive Garden #1587; Sam’s Club #6437; Serendipity Martini Bar; Square Donuts West; Starbucks Coffee #2387 – Downtown; The Bishop Bar; Twin Lakes Recreation Center; VFW Post #604.
For journalists and non-journalists alike, there’s just way more information available, and it’s all in one place, not locked up in separate .pdf files.
If you want to check the entire history of inspections for any establishment, just click the dot on the map, and up pops a panel showing the results of the latest inspection. Then use the arrows in the left corner of the panel—to scroll through the results of each previous inspection, dating back to 2011.
The county’s color codes for dots on the master map are different from The B Square’s color codes for its monthly maps—which corresponded to the number of critical and non-critical violations for that month’s inspection.
Monroe County’s color codes correspond to the type of establishment: restaurant; food truck; school; seas/temp; pantry. If you want to look only at restaurants, there’s toggles on the map for viewing only at restaurants, or any other category.
If you want to see just the establishments that had inspections in some month, you can filter the whole pile of dots by selecting a date range.
The new map-based approach is also more comprehensive than the previous monthly .pdf reports. Now included are follow-up inspections and complaint-driven inspections, not just routine inspections.
The filter for restaurants from Aug. 1 – Aug. 30 yields 66 inspections: 31 had no violations; 11 had at least one non-critical violation; and 24 had at least one critical violation.
Here’s the list of restaurants that had no violations in their August 2024 inspections.
AMC Showplace Theater #12; Autumn Park Senior Community; Bake Me A Cake Etc; Bell Trace Senior Living; Bloomington Bagel Company – Commissary; Breksters LLC; Chipotle Mexican Grill #4605; Considerate Meals; Crazy Horse; CVS Pharmacy #6713; Dominos Pizza (North); Elli Mays Smoked BBQ – Commissary; Family Dollar #25431; Gables Bagels at One World; Hartzells Production; Hoppy Wobbles Pub; Jeanette Molina Catering; Lost Farm Meal Service; Mama Dukes Hawaiian Barbeque; MCL Center Catering at Convention Center; MONROE HOSPITAL; One World Kitchen Share; Orbit Room; Papa Johns Pizza #3284 – Ellettsville; Pinoy Garden Cafe; Segoviafood LLC; Self Titled Vegetarian Kitchen and Catering; Tabs Kitchen; The Summer Kitchen; The Tap; Toppers Pizza; Casa Brava #2616 – West; Classic Lanes; Cozy Table Restaurant; Dollar Tree #01854; Domo Steak and Sushi; Dragon Chinese Restaurant; Guckenheimer Services LLC; Jump N’ Joeys; Subway #1005; Texas Roadhouse; and Village Pantry #5499.
Readers can look forward to future B Square reporting on the work by the actual human beings who are public servants of Monroe County government and who collaborated to build the food inspection report map.
That way, you’ll know exactly who in the GIS division and the health department to thank.
