North County water board votes to temporarily stop fluoridation

The Olivenhain Municipal Water District needs to suspend its water fluoridation program for up to 90 days to look into employee safety concerns, a majority of the district’s board decided Wednesday.

While the topic of putting fluoride into drinking water has been a hot-button political issue of late and President Trump’s Health & Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is encouraging states to ban fluoride in drinking water contending it’s a toxic substance, OMWD board member Christy Guerin said the board’s action Wednesday wasn’t political.

Instead, it was in response to safety concerns related to handling of the huge fluoride bags, said Guerin, a former Encinitas mayor and formerly worked as a district director for former U.S. Rep. Brian Bilbray, R-Carlsbad.

“The operators have made it clear how dangerous this is,” she said after the district’s plant director gave a slideshow presentation of the multi-step process that employees follow to put the 2,200-pound bags of powdered fluoride into the treatment plant’s processing system, a process that happens about once a week during peak summer water use periods.

Guerin was on the water board 15 years ago when it made the decision to establish the fluoridation program and said it was “a difficult decision” because “many people in the community were not happy” with it. At Wednesday’s meeting, she initially made a motion to pursue stopping the program permanently. That proposal, which would ...