On July 13, 2026, the Joplin City Council held a work session to discuss two major topics: a potential transition from a pass/fail system to a scoring or letter-grade system for routine health inspections of food establishments, and a review of the city's camping ordinance prompted by community concerns. The meeting included presentations from the Health Department, Police Department, and the Municipal Prosecutor, followed by council discussion and consensus on next steps.
All right, folks, we'll get uh started here at 545 for our work session today on July 13th. Uh thank all the council members uh for being here this evening. Uh first thing on the agenda is the uh health inspection grading. Welcome, Devin. Hello. Good evening, council. For those of you I haven't met yet, I'm Devin Blankenship. I'm the assistant director at the Joplin Health Department. So here at your requests, uh present you with some information on grading for routine health inspections for food establishments. Okay. So gonna throw a lot of information out at you tonight. Just want to kind of give you a good understanding of where we currently operate with regard to food inspections. Um the city of Joplin, we have our own local food ordinance. It's modeled after the 2009 FDA food ordinance. So approximately every four years, the FDA publishes a model food code. Um so the state of Missouri, I believe it was in 2013 adopted the 2009 food ordinance, and that's the one they're currently operating under. In conjunction with that, we updated our food code to reflect the changes the state made. Um so that's the state of things to now for now. Um so there have been several iterations of the food code published by the FDA since then. The current one is the 2022 Model FDA food code. Um the state of Missouri is currently looking at adopting that. They've been working on that for a couple years. So we're we're kind of anticipating some changes coming down the pipeline pretty soon on that. But for now, we're still in the 2009 world, so if that makes any sense. Um our food code, if you can see in that PowerPoint, those bullet points uh of the requirements, each of those is a chapter in our food code. Um so there's lots of things. It's about a hundred and twenty-page document of requirements, you know, things regarding if employees are sick when they can or can't come to work, temperatures for cooking foods, what food contact surfaces are constructed of, how to wash dishes, things like that. Uh one of the chapters is compliance and enforcement, and it actually sets forth our mechanisms for doing inspections, pulling permits, designating compliance status, how often we do food inspections and things like that. So anyway. So uh as far as what we're doing, the work we're currently doing as far as routine food inspections go, uh there and the number fluctuates. You know, we have restaurants closing and opening all the time. When I pulled the number last, we had 485 licensed full-time food establishments that we did routine inspections on. Um that can be anything from a restaurant, convenience store, grocery store, or a full-time food truck, ones that are permitted for uh 365-day operations. Um as far as what we kind of to give you an idea of how many inspections we did last year, um bear in mind we have three full-time inspectors, and then I kind of pitch in where we need help to do some of that work as well. We did about 800 routine inspections last year, um, and then we did 99 routine revisits. So think of routine revisits. That's like a routine that failed that needs a follow-up. So about one out of every routine inspections we had to follow up on uh to make sure things got corrected. We also did a lot of complaints, 72 complaints, 66 pre-openings. Pre-openings can be a brand new restaurant, can be a new food truck, lots of new food trucks, uh, and then it can also be like a change of ownership that would initiate a pre-opening as well. Um we did a lot of temporary food inspections as well. Things like think of like 4th of July, if they have food trucks that aren't fully licensed, they buy a permit and we do an inspection to make sure they meet the sanitation guidelines as well. Um so that's a big load of work there. And we did some emergency response. Those are things like restaurant fires or sewage backing up into a restaurant. We go into those, we get called out to those and make sure the food's disposed of uh appropriately and the kitchen's brought into working order before they resume operations. Okay, so scoring would apply to routine inspections to give you a better idea of what we're doing with routine inspections. These are unannounced inspections, that's the way we've done them. Um so they don't know we're coming. The our goal for a routine inspection is to make sure they are following the requirements of the code.