I am helping a friend who has to attend Disciplinary Hearing (California).
Basically the inspector checked foot SPA at her beauty salon and took off the foot SPA screen (the white thing in the picture) and told that it is not clean enough so she has to pay $500 fine.
Well, she cleans Foot SPA after every customer, but, yes, it seems that screen was not brushed to a perfectly clean state so that only white plastic surface would be visible. And I found that the regulations at http://www.barbercosmo.ca.gov/laws_regs/act_regs.pdf quite explicitly state:
(2) Scrub all visible residue from the screen, inside walls of the basin, any
other removable parts, and the area behind them with a clean brush and liquid soap
and water.
1. Is there a point to appeal this case? In particular - can the fine be reduced or waived by claiming that either the screen wasn't that dirty when inspector checked it or that the amount of fine is, in our opinion, too high for such a violation?
2. Can appealing lead to more trouble? I just checked myself that some of these regulations are subjective and very demanding. I am pretty sure that they could find some other things that they would not like and come up with extra fine for other things. Perhaps keeping low profile is better in this case?