Orange County health officials are preparing a proposal to publicly rate restaurants based on their sanitation practices – similar to systems in neighboring counties that use A, B and C letter grades.

The proposal, requested by Board of Supervisors Chairman Todd Spitzer, comes despite two previous failed attempts to adopt restaurant grades. It follows new concerns over food safety.

A Register watchdog report earlier this month documented recent climbs in major sanitation violations and forced restaurant closures after years of shrinking oversight by Orange County inspectors. Major violations are issued for conditions that pose an immediate danger to public health.

County health officials said two weeks ago that they planned to request more funding this year to maintain inspection levels, but grading restaurants wasn’t on the radar. The Board of Supervisors rejected a color-coded grading system in November that would have cost about $40,000.

Then, on Sunday, Spitzer said on Twitter that county staff were working on a proposal similar to the letter grade system used in Los Angeles County. And, he tweeted, it would be funded by taxpayers instead of business fees.

Restaurant and other food business owners largely finance the county’s inspection operations through annual health permit fees, which start at $561 for small restaurants. The possibility of increasing these fees was a key sticking point last year when the supervisors rejected a grading system.

Neither Spitzer nor his four colleagues on the board were available for interviews Monday. The board is scheduled to meet today, but food safety is not on the official agenda.

Orange County is the only major Southern California county that doesn’t use a letter grade system to notify patrons of recent inspection results. It requires business owners to post one of three placards: pass, re-inspection due or closed.

A citizen grand jury urged the county to adopt letter grades in 2008 and last year advocated for color-coded grades, arguing the county’s current system provides customers with too little information. Four out of five county supervisors verbally endorsed the idea of a grading system after the second grand jury report, but the board couldn’t reach an agreement before the end of the year.

Spitzer has previously supported letter grades over color-coded grades. Supervisor Shawn Nelson has opposed any grading system. Nelson argued last year that government should relay to patrons only whether a restaurant is safe or unsafe for use, like a building code inspection.

“The more grades you get, the more subjective it’s going to get,” Nelson said at a board meeting in April last year. “Making government complex is asking to create irritation in the public.”

The positions of their three colleagues, fellow Republicans, are less clear. Michelle Steel, Lisa Bartlett and Andrew Do each joined the board after it rejected a grading system in November and haven’t responded to interview requests in recent weeks.

Annual financial disclosures show Nelson last year received between $10,000 and $100,000 from a Fullerton nightclub to which he had lent money. While Do has previously operated a sandwich shop, he reported no income from any food business in his most recent disclosures.

Health officials are seeking additional funding for the county this year to stop a decline in inspection rates. The county once inspected restaurants four times annually, in sync with Food and Drug Administration recommendations. Now it inspects them about half as often.

Without more funding before July, officials say, some of the county’s 8,500 permitted restaurants will be inspected only once a year.

Contact the writer: kkyle@ocregister.com or on Twitter: @keegankyle