ABILENE, Texas — The Abilene City Council has come to a decision to temporarily suspend adding fluoride to their water based on a Federal Court ruling in California regarding potential dangers.
“What we did is, we put a temporary suspension of fluoride to the drinking water,” Abilene Mayor, Weldon hurt, said. “There’s some new studies and some class action lawsuits that, you know, we found that could possibly be detrimental to health. And so we just wanted to temporarily suspend it to give us some time to do some research and see where we can go from here.”
On October 17, the Abilene City Council will decide on what the trigger to move to the next step is.
“That trigger could be a time, we could say, okay, in six months we are going to make a decision,” Abilene City Council member place five, Kyle McAlister, said. “That trigger could also be, okay we’re going to keep not adding fluoride and we’re going to continue to pause the addition to fluoride to the water until the EPA rules. So those are kind of our two options.”
Mayor Hurt said they are planning to create a new ordinance to decide how long this temporary suspension will last.
“We will probably start some conversations on what we would do if we permanently took fluoride out of the drinking water,” Mayor Hurt said. “There’s some federal and state guidelines that we have to meet before we actually use the word permanent, but I think with the input from our citizens of Abilene that we need to have that discussion. We need to have that discussion of if we want to permanently remove it, but right now it is just a temporary suspension.”
Once the EPA rules, or the council reaches a time deadline, they will then make a decision on what to do next.
“Decisions might be, we’re going to go back to what we were doing with keeping the fluoride in, we might make a decision, or we could as a council say, okay we are going to end fluoridation, or we could send it back to the voters,” McAlister said. “You know, the voters voted to add fluoride in 2000, some would say a lot has changed since then, a lot more information is out, and maybe they need to have another election, but that’s down the road.”
Original article online at: https://www.ktxs.com/news/local/abilene-city-council-to-evaluate-future-of-fluoride-in-water-after-temporary-suspension