Hawaii’s color-coded restaurant ratings system has marked a year, but diners still can’t see those grades online.

The state is spending $158,000 to redo a website database after wasting thousands of dollars on a project that was supposed to give the public online access to restaurant health inspections in 2013.

The Health Department signed a contract last month with technology firm Digital Health Department Inc. to build an electronic billing, permitting and online database of inspections for more than 10,000 establishments statewide.

The state previously paid $170,000 to Paragon Bermuda Canada Ltd. to do the work, but terminated that contract earlier this year due to "poor performance."

"Part of the contract was to put it up on the website, but what the day-to-day inspections staff were doing in the field was not getting uploaded into the system," said Peter Oshiro, the department’s environmental health program manager. "It was unacceptable to continue with them. It got progressively worse over time."

The new contractor is "going to do the exact same thing Paragon was supposed to do," said Oshiro.

Despite the failed project, state taxpayers won’t get restitution for the faulty system.

"There is no clause that says if you’re not happy, you get your money back," Oshiro said. "It was for work they did perform. They just didn’t perform it well."

State Auditor Jan Yamane released a scathing audit last week, criticizing Health Department employees for their lack of oversight to ensure the state actually gets what it pays for with taxpayer dollars when purchasing goods or services.

"The biggest difference between private industry and government is the (government) is locked into a low-bid process," Oshiro said. "When you do that I strongly feel you sacrifice quality for cost. The government can’t seem to pull away from that. Until we go to a process where we can procure by quality, then we’ll never get a quality product. That’s not a Health Department problem; it’s a statewide system problem."

The Health Department launched a food safety program intended to reduce foodborne illnesses in 2011. The goals were to increase inspector positions, move to paperless inspection reports the public could access online and start a color-coded grading system prominently displayed at restaurants. The DOH investigates about 200 cases of foodborne illnesses a year.

The department has 43 of 50 inspector positions currently filled, though the bulk of workers are new and have a steep learning curve, Oshiro said. After one year the DOH has completed roughly 80 percent of the first round of inspections, or 8,134 of 10,152 eateries statewide.

There were 6,486 green placards issued to restaurants, indicating no more than one critical violation that needed to be corrected at the time of inspection. Another 1,648 were given yellow placards, or "conditional passes," with two or more critical violations that needed to be fixed. None received a red card, which requires an establishment to close immediately due to an imminent health hazard to the community.

Over the past year the DOH fined two Oahu restaurants for removing a yellow placard: $11,000 for Iyo Udon at Ala Moana Center and $8,000 for Ichiben in Waimalu Shopping Plaza.

"We think it’s working remarkably well, from the standpoint as far as how quickly the industry corrects violations voluntarily," Oshiro said. "We don’t want to fine and close establishments. We wanted to find a way that would encourage voluntary cooperation."

But some restaurants have said the new regulations that require workers to wash their hands up to their elbows for 20 seconds, wear gloves when handling food and ensure food temperatures are hot or cold enough to prevent bacteria are cumbersome and inconsistent.

"Some health inspectors will take off for the exact same issue that other health inspectors won’t take off for," said Tom Frigge, an independent restaurant consultant who teaches food safety classes. "Different health inspectors have different biases where they think one thing is more important than another health inspector thinks. Anytime you’re dealing with humans, it’s subjective. It shouldn’t be but it is."

While Highway Inn earned green placards for both its Waipahu and Kakaako locations, it’s easy for an establishment to get a yellow card for small things, which is a downside of the system, according to Monica Toguchi, the company’s president and chief executive officer.

"If one hot item such as rice is not holding at 135 degrees or more and one cold item such as lomi salmon is not colder than 41 degrees, that would earn a yellow placard despite the establishment doing everything else correct," she said. "In this regard, businesses and employees can be negatively affected if consumers are dissuaded from eating at an establishment."

Rainbow Drive-In co-owner Jim Gusukuma added that the rating program was an initial concern among restaurants.

"The first set of restaurants that got inspected kind of took the brunt of it and were kind of the guinea pigs upfront," he said. "As long as it’s enforced evenly across the board, I think it’s great for the public. It’s for the benefit of the public, and certainly where food safety is concerned, all restaurants and food purveyors have a responsibility of providing the safest food possible."

But Hawaii is far behind most of the country in its food safety program, Frigge said.

"Since it’s been over a year now and they still don’t have all the restaurants done for the first time, obviously it’s not working up to par yet," he added. "If the rollout had gone as hoped, they would’ve been done by now, but when you’re rolling out a program of this magnitude, it never goes as smoothly as one hopes. I wouldn’t say it’s a complete disaster by any stretch. It could’ve gone better, and there’s lots of growing pains and lots of learning curves."