The Pagosa Springs Area Chamber of Commerce, San Juan Basin Public Health (SJBPH), and the new Archuleta County Public Health Department (ACPHD) gave a joint presentation to restaurant owners and food vendors on December 5 at Rosie’s Pizzeria, to explain the ‘hand-off’ currently underway between SJBPH and ACPHD around food service permits and inspections.
The tables at Rosie’s were pretty well filled, as they often are during the dinner hour, except this was 10am in the morning, and the people filling the tables weren’t customers, but food service workers and public health professionals. The discussion, aimed at the health of our community, lasted about an hour.
Introductions were handled by Ashley Wilson, the new ACPHD director, and Angelica Leslie, newly hired by ACPHD to handle food service permits and inspections. Ms. Leslie was previously the dietary supervisor at Pagosa Springs Medical Center and is a ‘certified health coach’.
The Environmental Health division at SJBPH — with its main offices in Durango — has been in charge of food safety for Archuleta and La Plata counties for the past several decades, but 18 months ago, the commissioners in those two counties agreed to dissolve SJBPH and have each county establish its own public health department. SJBPH will cease to exist on January 1, 2024…
…and on that date, ACPHD will take charge of our public health in Archuleta County, including food safety and restaurant permitting.
Ms. Leslie addressed the crowd briefly:
“This going to be an awesome experience. It’s new; it’s a bit scary. But it’s going to be good.
“You don’t need to worry about any of your licenses getting expired. We’ll be sending out email notifications the first week in January, and then you’ll have another month or so, to get the fees in and taken care of, and we will submit your new licenses… You can walk into the office on South 8th Street and hand them a check, or you can do it online through our portal, which is currently being set up. Or you can mail in a check.”
The fee amounts haven’t changed, she told the group. “You will get your letter and your invoice at the same time, so you will see exactly what you’re being charged for.”
Ms. Leslie said she will be the person performing the inspections, and that restaurants and vendors will be given advance notice of upcoming inspections.
She then introduced Cody, from the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment food safety division. (We didn’t get Cody’s last name.)
Questions from the audience concerned employee certification training opportunities and new regulations. Ms. Leslie noted that, within the next year, restaurants will be required to have a certified ‘food manager’ onsite at all times, for every shift.
Most of the ‘question-and-answer’ portion of the meeting centered on questions concerning ‘service animals’. Legally, ‘service animals’ are dogs or miniature horses that are specially trained to assist their owner with a medical, physical, or mental condition. Birds and other animals are not qualified as service animals, nor do pets qualify that provide ’emotional support’ to their owner. A restaurant is not allowed to admit non-service animals into an indoor seating area.
A restaurant can choose to provide outdoor seating for owners of non-service animals, so long as the outdoor seating area does not require the animals to pass through the indoor portion of the restaurant.
Questions were raised about specialty food items produced ‘in-house’ — such as home-made sausage or pickled products such as kimchi. Cody explained that a food vendor wanting to deviate from the Food Code — keeping food for longer than seven days, for example, or keeping food at room temperature that normally requires refrigeration — must apply to the state for a ‘variance’ which typically requires a comprehensive report covering the prevention of potential food-borne illnesses.
At the conclusion of the presentation, participants were invited to give the name of the food service they represented.
Not every local restaurant and food vendor was represented. I was there representing Pagosa Peak Open School, which serves student lunches from its new kitchen and gets inspected on a regular basis. Most of the attendees were representing ‘sit-down’ restaurants — from what I could tell, generally the more popular restaurants in town. Perhaps that’s part of the reason they are the most popular restaurants… because they especially care about food safety?
A few food truck vendors were present, and a couple of institutional kitchens. I didn’t notice any fast-food restaurants in the audience.
Bill Hudson began sharing his opinions in the Pagosa Daily Post in 2004 and can’t seem to break the habit. He claims that, in Pagosa Springs, opinions are like pickup trucks: everybody has one.