Find Out How Area Arenas, Stadiums Measure Up With Food Inspections

ESPN recently reviewed the health inspections of more than 100 big league arenas and stadiums.

Twenty-eight percent had critical or major violations at more than half their concession stands, including the new Dallas Cowboy stadium.

So ABC-7 decided to investigate how borderland arenas and stadiums score in the food safety game. Eat, drink and be wary Because chowing down at the game can be risky business.

El Paso’s top food safety cop is City of El Paso Health Department Food Manager David Sublasky.

“The hard part for a stadium is, a large part of the time they’re closed,” Sublasky pointed out. “If there’s not an event, it’s sitting there and of course rodents, insects, etc.”

And that’s why at places that fall under the jurisdiction of the City-County Health Department, like Cohen Stadium:

“We would be looking for any rodent problem, rodent droppings, any cockroaches, that type of thing,” he said.

Grossed out? Before you swear never to eat another Diablo Dog, Cohen changed concessionaires in 2009. Sodexo took over and provided an assessment of 20 things that had to be fixed before a new permit could be issued.

Two weeks later, the facility scored a perfect 100 – during the off-season.

“Sixty-nine or below is failing,” Sublasky said. “We put them on at least a once a year cycle.”

Not always. ABC-7 found that Cohen wasn’t inspected a single time when they were actually serving food during the 2010 baseball season.

Over at the County Coliseum, National Concessions Services runs the show, and they’re also monitored by Sublasky’s inspectors. Three city inspections in 2009 and 10 of the Coliseum showed no critical violations. Most of the deductions were for food workers’ improper hand-washing.

“They could possibly, if they made contact with ready to eat foods, they could make people sick,” Sublasky said.

Sodexo is the Sun Bowl concessionaire. And they scored well in two gameday inspections by State’s Health Department.

After no inspections in 2009, the Sun Bowl scored a 94 and 91 during games this year. But during the SMU game, a critical violation — 40 hot dogs were found in a broken fridge “at eighty degrees farenheit.”

The concession stand was voluntarily closed.

“In terms of the temperature of foods, that’s actually a very big issue,” Sublasky said. “Hot foods should be kept hotter than 135 degrees and cold foods should be kept colder than 41 degrees farenheit.”

Now that the focus has shifted from football at the Sun Bowl to basketball at the Haskins Center, how does the haskins center grade out when it comes to recent food inspections?

Unfortunately, we don’t know. According to the Texas Department of Health Services, no inspections were performed in the arena in 2009 and yet in 2010.

State health officials explained that they “had difficulty finding inspectors to fill open staff positions in that area during that time period, but have since hired people to conduct those inspections.”

While shooting this story, Haskins Center Concessions Manager Saul Chee of Sodexo told us the company performs its own internal inspections and ABC-7 should look at those.

Chee referred ABC-7 to his boss – who wouldn’t let the station see them. So we asked the fans.

“We’re concerned, but not too much,” said longtime Miner fan Larry Trejo and his wife. “We enjoy the food and we’ve never gotten sick. The nly time we get sick is sometimes when we look at the scoreboard.”

Up in new mexico, the State Environment Department does the inspecting … and they found a lot.

“Any kind of violation is important for us,” said Tammy Anthony, NMSU’S Assistant Vice President of Auxiliary Services. “To have a lot of violations is really unusual and upsetting because we are all looking at it so closely together, we really should be more on top of it.”

Inspectors found six high risk violations at the Pan Am Center during a 2009 inspection and seven earlier this month, including several food temperature violations.

Across the street at Aggie Memorial Stadium, a 2009 inspection found five high risk violations, and this football season, an inspection found another four.

ABC-7 contacted NMSU concessionaire Aramark, which issued this statement: “Serving safe, nutritious and quality food is our top priority. we have ongoing, rigorous training and quality assurance processes to ensure we meet very high standards … the issues noted in the inspection reports were all immediately addressed and corrected.”

“I think there are training issues at times,” said Anthony, “but I think that Aramark works very closely with NMSU and NMSU’s expectations are very high in this area.”

As they should be.

So Borderland sports fans don’t have to eat, drink, and be wary!

Although NMSU’s Aggie Memorial Stadium and Pan Am Center had the most critical violations of any of the large venues in the borderland ABC-7 reviewed the inspections for, they were always approved to continue operating by the State of New Mexico Environment Department, which does not give a numerical grade like Texas does for its food inspections.

Search the food inspection ratings of these and other El Paso establishments here.