In recent weeks, we’ve heard a great deal of chatter about the insufficient regulation of food trucks in Los Angeles. Inadequately inspected food trucks are indeed a very real public health threat, one that the Los Angeles County Association of Environmental Health Specialists has long been working to resolve.

As the organization representing the county’s health inspectors, the association’s objective is simple: reduce the public’s exposure to health risks from food and the environment.

The fact is every day people across the county eat food prepared by uninspected vendors, including thousands of food trucks. The reason we are falling short of monitoring a fleet of mobile kitchens capable of rapidly spreading food-borne illness isn’t always obvious. The Department of Public Health’s stated reason for the abysmal lack of inspection – that food trucks are always on the move – doesn’t really make sense.

These regular inspections are critical resources not only for consumers, but for small food service businesses across the county as well. These businesses benefit greatly from thorough, detailed inspections because they are sources of information about how to adopt best public health practices. In addition, for the food trucks that are not as well known, a positive letter grade resulting from a successful health inspection can often win over a potential customer.

The association’s health inspectors were already tasked with the herculean responsibility of evaluating every restaurant and food kiosk in Los Angeles when a 2011 law expanded these inspection duties to food trucks. The law drastically increased the work load of the health inspectors, but the demands of tracking and inspecting these vehicles are not unmanageable.

On the surface, it seems easy to point to inadequate funding as the source of the shortcoming. But based on how much money the Department of Environmental Health generates in fees, funding should not be a concern.

In fact, between 2009 and 2011, county Supervisor Gloria Molina’s office offered more than $250,000 in supplementary funds to bolster food inspection resources in the field. Yet the management of the Department of Public Health, which oversees Environmental Health, surprisingly rejected it.

Some claim that the reason for inadequate inspection of food trucks is due, in large part, to a lack of information about the vendors and difficulty keeping track of their locations. I can say with first-hand experience that this is flat out wrong. Locations for most of these mobile vendors can be found through a simple permit check.

With that said, my former colleagues and I share the same question that many members of the public have posed – if our resources are adequate, why does a lack of resources seem to exist in the field?

Trust fund audit

To answer this question, the Board of Supervisors needs to order an audit of the Environmental Health Trust Fund that finances these vital health programs.

It might surprise many to learn that Environmental Health is the sole revenue-generating division within the Department of Public Health. The association’s work issuing health permits and licenses usually comes at a fee, which is supposed to offset the costs of the inspection and licensing procedure.

In 1999, we felt that those fees were increasing at a disproportional rate and were being mismanaged by the county. We turned to the courts for help, and the Los Angeles Superior Court did help, ruling in our favor and finding that money generated by health inspection programs had been diverted elsewhere and ordered $10 million in fees collected, as well as all fees collected in the future, to go into a single segregated trust fund so that Environmental Health had proper funding moving forward.

An independent audit will reveal if the fees collected from health inspections are going where they should to fund what they should. It will reveal if the monies in the trust fund are being allocated efficiently and supervised responsibly.

We have seen other cases recently where officials have held the transparency of public funds management as crucial to the public interest.

Last month, the same Board of Supervisors the association implores to order an audit did just that to investigate how the Department of Public Health investigates health and safety complaints inside nursing homes. Weeks later, a Superior Court judge ordered an audit.

It seems this is the season of fiscal accountability, and I can’t imagine where this tide of greater transparency would be more beneficial than in encouraging a thorough investigation of the account that funds the operations of the Department of Environmental Health.

After all, the association simply wants to ensure that it can do its most important job effectively: safeguard the health of Angelenos.

James Somers is the former chairman of the Los Angeles County Association of Environmental Health Specialists.