3 Questions with Mayor Greg Fischer About Louisville's Partnership with Yelp

In June, Mayor Greg Fischer (above left) announced that Yelp (above right, kind of) will post Louisville restaurant's health-inspection results and scores with its listings. When implementation occurs later this summer, our little old city will join San Francisco as the only municipalities sharing that information with Yelp.

Eater asked Mayor Fischer who the initiated the relationship, its permanence and how quickly listings will be updated.

How did this relationship come about? Did Yelp approach you?

No, they approached us. I'm active with the U.S. Conference of Mayors and the technology subcommittee there. Ed Lee is a friend of mine, the mayor of San Francisco, and they're on board with Yelp. And they contacted somebody on staff. They knew that we were already online with the ratings, so it's just a question of scraping what's online over into Yelp.

Is this relationship with Yelp going to be reviewed periodically to see if it's working out for both partners?

We're committed to open data. So this data was already available online through the city's website. So any data we have were trying to share with as many sources as possible, because it gives more transparency to the city. As long as they're accurately scraping the data, which I can't see would be a problem, I can't see why there'd be any issue.

Is Yelp committed to updating it within a certain time period?

I don't know if it's daily, but I know maximum it's weekly, is what I've been told. Chris Poynter [Mayor Fischer's director of communications] will be able to tell you. [Via email, Poynter wrote "Yelp updates once a day."] That's very important to us. Because if somebody has a bad rating, we don't want them stuck with that. It's also important that our public health department quickly review or goes through appeals as well. What we're trying to do from a public health and wellness standpoint is have the most clean, most tasty restaurants in the world. And groups like Yelp are a partner in that strategy.

·7 Top Louisville Restaurants Earned C Health Inspection Scores in the Past Year [~ELOU~]
·The Analects of Yelper Jeff J. [~ELOU~]

[Photos: Courtesy Committee to re-elect Greg Fischer and Yelp]