A City Council bill that would have required Baltimore eateries to post grades based on health inspections was defeated Monday night, failing by one vote after three council members switched their positions amid intense lobbying by restaurant owners.
"The loser is the citizens of Baltimore," Councilman Brandon Scott, the bill's lead sponsor, said afterward. "I'm very, very angry some of my colleagues changed their votes, but you keep fighting for transparency."
Gino Cardinale, owner of City Cafe in Mount Vernon, said he called or emailed every council member over the past week to urge them to amend or vote against the legislation, which he believes is misguided. He said he called more than 100 restaurant owners to get them to lobby against the bill. Some owners worried posting a bad grade could stick them with a "scarlet letter" that would take months to reverse, while hurting business.
"Restaurants are either clean and fit to be open or they're not," Cardinale said.
Scott's bill would have required every restaurant and carryout in the city to post its health rating based on a city review of its cleanliness. Under the bill, establishments would have been given grades of "excellent," "good" or "fair." The legislation would have applied to most places were food is prepared and sold, including grocery stores and food trucks. The bill also would have required the Health Department to post a searchable online database of restaurant inspections.
Earlier this month, the council gave preliminary approval to the measure by a vote of 10-5.
But three councilmen who had supported the bill — Eric T. Costello, James B. Kraft and William "Pete" Welch — changed their votes Monday night. The bill mustered only seven votes on the 15-member council, one shy of passage.
All three councilmen expressed concern that the legislation could negatively impact restaurants. Kraft said he worried that the health department wouldn't have enough resources to quickly re-inspect restaurants that got a bad grade.
"We started hearing from restaurants in the district," said Kraft, who represents Fells Point, Canton and other southeast neighborhoods. "I thought, I'm going to err on the side of the restaurants. ... I don't want to put anybody out of business because the health department couldn't do inspections in time. Long term, it's something we may come back to."
Costello sought a last-minute amendment to the bill that would have allowed eateries who were not rated "excellent" to pay the city $200 to be re-inspected within two weeks. The amendment failed on a 9-4 vote.
"It's important that if [a health inspection] was not, for whatever reason, done right the first time, that there is some type of administrative recourse," Costello said.
Welch said he worried a health inspector might give a restaurant a low grade because he or she didn't "like" the owner.
Scott argued that city residents have a right to know before they eat whether an establishment has the highest standards of cleanliness, citing similar efforts in New York, San Francisco and Charlotte, N.C.
The bill had languished in committee for more than two years due in part to some members' frequent absence from committee meetings. Scott took the rare step of petitioning the bill out of committee this month.
City Councilwoman Mary Pat Clarke said she supported the measure as a way to let people know the cleanest establishments to eat.
"We're a 21st-century town," Clarke said. "This lets the public know where this restaurant stands."
But Casey Jenkins, who owns Birdland Sports Bar & Grill in Rosemont East, applauded in the council chambers after the bill was killed. He said he worried it was a way for the city to charge restaurants another fee. He wanted language stating the city could charge no fees as a result of the health grading system.
"We need to find a way to bring small businesses back to Maryland instead of trying to stifle them," Jenkins said.
Melvin R. Thompson, the lobbyist for the Restaurant Association of Maryland, said his clients were "very pleased" with the outcome.
"In the end there were a lot of questions that remain with regards to the ability of the health department to do reinspections because of their limited staff," he said. "We think the council made the right decision. However, we still fully support posting full inspection reports online. We hope to work with the health department to provide that information on the health department website as soon as possible."
Scott said lamented that some council members relied too heavily on pleasing "interest groups" instead of Baltimore residents. He vowed to try again at a later date.
"You will not meet a citizen in the city of Baltimore who will say they don't want this," Scott said.
"Restaurants say, 'Well, the health department was mean to me.' Well, if you have rats in your store, if you have mice in your store, if you have insects in your store, I'm sorry, we should be mean to you. ... It's embarrassing. Every city in America you can look at health inspection reports online except Baltimore."
Baltimore Sun reporter Yvonne Wenger contributed to this article.
twitter.com/lukebroadwater