A Conversation With ... Kevin Gipson

Springfield has had two notable restaurant health scares recently: the shutdown of Mr. Yen’s and the hepatitis contamination at Red Robin. Is this a common problem for a city this size?
You have to put it in perspective. We have over 2,000 permitted establishments in Greene County. Certainly, out of those 2,000, we are going to have problems with a few. We are very aggressive, and we take food safety very seriously.

Some of these high-profile cases are going to make the news, but we work with these owners extensively, like Mr. Yen’s. They’ve had problems, as everybody has documented, several months and even years prior to closure. We were trying to get them up to speed.

Our job is not just to be the hammer. We believe we can turn people around and educate them through food schools in whatever language they want. If there are problems, we are going to try to correct that and not use the hammer, but we have that ability if we feel the public health is at risk.

What was the final outcome of the Red Robin hepatitis scare for the Health Department?
We have a fairly young workforce here who weren’t around in the late 1990s when we had a significant public health outbreak of hepatitis A going on with a food service worker at Village Inn on Campbell. Bob Green and the Green brothers worked with us to solve that problem. But he will tell you, after that incident in ’97, his business went down about 50 percent for six months.

With Red Robin, we knew what the right thing to do was, we just had to make sure. We got the diagnosis on Tuesday evening and made the decision by Wednesday morning. It was not without thought or consideration. It affects a lot of people and is extremely expensive for us to administer the vaccine. The cost of the vaccine alone, we use federal assets to fund that, for almost 3,000 doses was about $30,000.

The Health Department provides numerous other services to the community. What are some of the most used?
We often call public health a stealth-like profession. We do lots of things behind the scenes. A good day in public health is when nothing happens. A bad day is when we are in the news talking about a hepatitis outbreak in a restaurant. That was a failure of the public health system, and we take responsibility for that.

Many people don’t know we do all grade-A milk and dairy farms in southwest Missouri. We have a very vibrant environmental lab and do all the pollen counts for Springfield. Our epidemiologist, our disease detectors, we have three working all the time behind the scenes and looking at death certificates, emergency room reports from the local hospitals for changes in trends, which could suggest a problem.

One of the things we are most proud of is our (Women, Infants & Children) program and how we work with moms and babies. We have the largest, most active WIC program in the state of Missouri with over 90,000 visits a year.

How many programs is the Health Department funding and overseeing each year?
There are about 60 programs we deal with in the area and receive funding from different sources. Some state funding, but most of our funding comes from city property tax that was established in 1954. Our annual operating budget is around $10 million and that’s contracted during the recession. It’s good to have a good mix of funding – city, county, state – the problem is, it doesn’t seem like they are all in sync. The city was hurting a few years ago, and we saw a contraction. Now, the county is hurting. With the state for the last 10 years, we have seen significant decreases. Federal funding is consistent, but they are programmatic.

Does the Health Department shut down restaurants often?
Generally, we haven’t had to shut down many restaurants in the past. Generally, it’s short term. We see a problem with the temperature of a refrigerator, for example, and they can’t continue to operate with that. Very seldom are they longer than 24 hours.

Sometimes, we get people who just can’t, for whatever reason, meet our demands and we have to make an example, like Mr. Yen’s. We had to close them down for Valentine’s Day weekend, which in the restaurant business is a high-volume weekend. We got to the point that we had to get their attention and felt there was enough of a risk to mark it for closure.

The Health Department is responsible for enforcing sections of Springfield’s urban chicken ordinance. Do many people keep chickens in the city?
That was pretty controversial when it got passed. We actively took a position against it. Not that we are against urban farming and safe and healthy local food, but we’ve seen many salmonella cases throughout the years. We were concerned on the public health side, and we took some heat over that.

We don’t get a lot of complaints. I think people figured our pretty quickly that it’s hard to raise a chicken and you can get a dozen eggs for a buck and a quarter at the grocery store. It was probably something we overreacted on, but I’d rather be proactive on the safe side than on the other side if something bad happens.

I think very few in town actually have chickens. They aren’t the cleanest creatures.

The Health Department partners with the Watershed Committee of the Ozarks to test select bodies of water during the summer months. Why is this important?
We have been doing this for years. We saw a real need. I think there was a lot of concern about the safety of body contact in some of these more common areas. Some jurisdictions test regularly and post warnings, such as Lake of the Ozarks where the state does it. We decided to do the test between Memorial Day and Labor Day when people will be in the water. We post on our website and they can make that conscience decision based on the range we consider safe. Oftentimes, when we advise against full-body contact, it’s because of high-water situations or runoff from animals. We test at places like Sequiota Park and Crighton Access, places we know they are likely to go swim.[[In-content Ad]]