A year after Mayor Bloomberg wiped out penalties for any restaurant scoring an A in its Health Department inspection, the city is collecting more fine revenue from eateries than ever before.
The mayor made the generous no-fine gesture in his 2011 State of the City speech.
By March — just two months later — Health Department inspectors were ringing up their first $4 million month.
Total collections will almost certainly exceed a record $50 million by the time the 2012 fiscal year ends June 30, up more than 50 percent in two years.
This is happening at a time when the department says it has awarded 77 percent of the city’s 22,536 restaurants the coveted grade of A, in which fines aren’t supposed to apply.
So who’s paying?
Officials say it’s the places landing the B’s and C’s, which are getting inspected more frequently.
“We basically pay more attention to those places,” explained Deputy Health Commissioner Dan Kass.
“We’re not fining more per inspection. We didn’t make the inspections harder. We didn’t raise the fines. We didn’t suddenly decide to be more punitive.”
But the grumbling about the inspection process is as loud as ever, including from some unexpected quarters.City Council Speaker Christine Quinn, who usually sees eye-to-eye with the administration, says she is being bombarded with complaints from restaurant owners.
“I have heard over and over again concerns about the grading system and the spike in fines,” said Quinn, who has scheduled hearings on the issue next month. “You hear it in every borough, in multiple neighborhoods.”
One of those complaints came from Ron Brannon, a partner of foodie superstar Donatella Arpaia.
DBar, which is part of the Donatella pizza restaurant, at Eighth Avenue and 19th Street, in Quinn’s district, was visited twice by inspectors last month and given summonses for more than $4,000.
“I don’t really understand the process,” said Brannon.
“If you are a direct threat to public health and safety, by all means you should be penalized. But if you have some administrative [issues], you don’t have to come down with a sledgehammer.”
By the department’s own standards, Donatella is a model of safety and sanitation. It passed its last graded inspection a year ago with not a single violation point, rare even for four-star eateries.
Kass says there’s evidence that poorly performing restaurants have gotten the message. He expects that fines have “plateaued” and that “we’re going to see them go down.”
You can bet that restaurateurs are praying he’s right. In the meantime, they should be aware that the department notified the mayor’s budget office last November that it is counting on collecting $3.8 million more in the 2013 fiscal year.