President’s Trump’s Florida resort, Mar-a-Lago, underwent emergency repairs in order to pass a health-department inspection last November, a new report says.
In the Nov. 8 inspection, the club was cited for smoke detectors that lacked flashing lights to guide the hearing-impaired during a fire, 15 food-safety violations, and “slabs of concrete missing from a staircase, exposing steel rebar that could cause someone to fall,” the Miami Herald reported on Monday.
The club’s two main kitchens got substandard marks for the second time in 2017. “Among the no-nos was the staff’s failure to track the freshness of potentially hazardous foods, including curry sauce dated Oct. 21 pulled from a freezer and improperly marked, milk stored at 49 degrees instead of the safe temperature of 41 degrees, and cases of hot dogs stored on the ground of the walk-in freezer,” reports the Herald.
The violations were considered “high priority” and required a follow-up visit a week later. The club was re-checked on Nov. 17 and met standards, a report said. Trump began his Thanksgiving vacation there a week after that.
Mar-a-Lago’s kitchens were previously found to violate safety codes in a February 2017 inspection. A week before a visit from Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, inspectors cited sushi that was ready for consumption that had “not undergone proper parasite destruction” and food stored in broken coolers that at temperatures high enough to cause spoilage.
Trump has owned Mar-a-Lago, a 1920s-built property with two restaurants and a B&B since 1985; he has branded it the “Winter White House.” The president has been accused of using the presidency to promote and profit from his properties. Soon after the election, the initiation fee for Mar-a-Lago was raised from $100,000 to $200,000 a year, with $14,000 annual dues. According to financial disclosure forms filed by Trump, the club had $29.7 million in revenue from June 2015 to May 2016.
