Guess Whats Coming With Dinner?
The people on Ninth Street, who operate the stores, remember that Frank Rizzo is the ultimate boss of the health inspectors, and expect kid-glove treatment from the department because they consider themselves to be the very people who put Rizzo in that big leather chair.
But the young, idealistic inspectors insist that the highly profitable market should be operated with a lot more sanitation and a lot less earthy squalor. They concede that produce and fish are difficult commodities to deal with but, they point out, similar problems exist throughout the city.
While Ninth Street recalls the hodgepodge of the 17th-century open market place, the occasional filthy flight kitchens at International Airport remind the inspectors that even jet-age technology does not necessarily guarantee cleanliness.
The battle for proper sanitation at the airport was a bitter one which the Health Department finally won after calling in top management personnel and nearly breaking off diplomatic relations with Tinicum Township health inspectors who insisted that the Philadelphia sanitarians had no jurisdiction on their side of the county line.
Because the number of Health Department inspectors has been dwindling, the program of food establishment inspections has been shrinking each year. In 1968-69 over 25,000 tours of food-related businesses were made. The next year only 24,000 tours were conducted. Last year the figure was down to 20,000, and this year the department estimates that the number of inspections will fall even lower, while the number of restaurants, retail stores and processors continues to swell.
And, if food inspections don’t keep the health department busy enough, they are also responsible for monitoring swimming pools and stables and investigating complaints about rat bites, dog bites, contagious diseases and lead poisoning.
On top of under-budgeting, the city job freeze has made the manpower problem in the department so acute that a policy of allowing jobs — inspectors, administrators and supervisors — to go unfilled has persisted so long that many jobs are eventually scratched from the department roster.
Despite the recent influx of young, Nader-Raider types, the public image of the Department of Health has never been very healthy. Past practices have fixed it in the public mind as a haven for drones, misfits and outcasts — would-be doctors who flunked out of medical school, druggists’ sons who couldn’t get pharmacies of their own and impoverished relatives of city councilmen.
But in the last 20 years, the Civil Service Commission has purged the department and established a respectable level of professionalism.
Due to the job freeze, the chain of command in the Department of Health is a bizarre one. Because positions are allowed to go unfilled, men who are denied the advanced civil service ratings must serve as temporary section chiefs and assistants, catching all the flack and bearing all the responsibility that goes with the jobs, but receiving no extra money or supervisory deference. This is like telling sergeants and lieutenants in the Army to perform the duties of captains and colonels without benefit of pay, promotion or executive privilege.
