Restaurants in Santa Clara County will be required to post a food-safety grading placard in their windows starting this fall, per a proposal the Santa Clara County Board of Supervisors unanimously approved Tuesday, April 29.

The new law mandates that all restaurants publicly post the color-coded placards indicating their inspection levels -- green for pass, yellow for conditional pass or red for fail/closed. In order to pass, restaurants cannot have more than one major violation ("major" is defined as any violation that poses an imminent health hazard). An establishment with two or more violations would receive the yellow "conditional pass" placard.

Restaurants that fail to correct violations upon inspection get slapped with the red card and are closed until they comply. This rating system is modeled after Sacramento County's "Green-Yellow-Red" grading system.

Santa Clara County does currently post restaurants whose permits have been suspended, along with the reason for the suspension and dates they closed and reopened. An online database is also searchable by restaurant and posts the most recent inspection report.

The law will also require that complete inspection results -- including all violations -- be posted on the Department of Environmental Health website, along with an "easy-to-understand" online score for these results (from 1 to 100).

"Right now, when you walk into a restaurant, about all you know for sure from a health and safety standpoint is that it hasn't been bad enough to get closed down," Simitian said in a statement. "And if nobody knows you're 'just barely good enough,' then there's no real incentive to do better."

The statement also calls food borne illness a "major public health issue," citing a Disease Control and Prevention estimate that each year, roughly one in six Americans (or more than 48 million people) gets sick, 128,000 are hospitalized and 3,000 die of foodborne diseases.

"This is pretty straightforward," Simitian said. "If the results of our health inspections are readily available, then local restaurants have an added incentive to improve food safety, and local consumers have the information they need to make informed choices."

Under the new law, restaurants will eventually have to pay an annual fee, but Simitian said there will be no fee increases in the next two fiscal years. When fiscal year 2016 arrives, staff said they don't expect restaurants to pay more than $100.

The county will bring on two new hires -- an additional environmental health specialist and a senior environmental health specialist -- to help ensure re-scoring of restaurants can be completed in a timely manner if the establishment has corrected the violations.

Simitian has long advocated for increased public access to restaurant-inspection information. While serving as supervisor in 2000, the board did approve a previous proposal he put forth to post health-inspection results online, but it was never actually implemented.

"In fact, when I returned to the Board in 2013, I discovered that we'd actually gone backwards in terms of our online disclosure efforts," he said. "I'm glad we're finally poised to make progress, even if it's coming 13 years later."