Environmental health head has made the valley safer for 21 years

Saturday, April 1, 2000 | 9:29 a.m.

Felix Havis began working for the Clark County Health District in 1979 with no prior experience in environmental health. That quickly changed.

For the next two years Havis, whose only prior job was as an Air Force medic for 21 years, learned just about every phase of his inspector's job, examining restaurants, trailer parks, pools, septic tanks, landfills, hazardous waste sites, etc.

When the health district needed to fill a supervisor's position in environmental health in 1981, Havis, an ex-master sergeant with three tours of Vietnam, was the clear choice.

"One of the biggest changes I have seen over the years is the public's improved interest in what is going on in the food industry," Havis said. "Today, people want to know more about the sanitary conditions of the places where they go to eat."

On Tuesday Havis, who has overseen an award-winning department that has made great strides to improve the sanitary conditions of the more than 8,000 eating establishments in Southern Nevada, will retire six days shy of his 61st birthday.

Havis achieved success not by wholesale shutdowns of eateries but by training his inspectors to work closely with restaurant operators to keep things clean and safe.

"The restaurant industry is not our adversary and we do not exist to put people out of business," said Havis, noting that only about a dozen restaurants need to be shut down each year for health violations.

"We work with restaurants to make sure their preparation of food is safe. Our inspectors pull no punches when it comes to finding violations. But we treat everyone even-handed, whether they are a big resort restaurant or a mom-and-pop operation."

Havis said the success of his department's regulatory methods is supported by the fact that there were no major food-illness outbreaks during his watch.

In 1998 Havis, four fellow supervisors and their staffs won the National Environmental Health Association's Crumbine Award for the top environmental health facility in the United States.

"Certainly that was a great honor," Havis said. "More importantly, it highlighted the performance and diligence of our people."

Although the local population has boomed, the health district staff that regulates businesses that require health permits has not grown much.

"When I came here there were 3,000 businesses with health permits and today there are 11,000," Havis said. "To regulate them we have done a lot of streamlining because our personnel is only a third over what it was in '79.

"What I have liked about this job is that no two days are ever alike. There is a lot of variety. I'd like to see that as the town continues to grow so will the confidence people have when they go to a local place to eat."

The district is yet to name Havis' successor.