Getz wouldn’t be the first council member to express doubts about fluoride. Putting fluoride in Beaumont’s public water system was never the preferred course of action for the council. According to Ward I council member Taylor Neild, the Beaumont city council in the early 80s initially voted against putting fluoride in the water. But when it was discovered that there were low levels of the chemical already in the water at the Loeb plant, they reluctantly chose to add fluoride throughout the system.

Getz has been advocating for the council to reconsider for a while now.

This time, he raised the issue of expensive damage to municipal infrastructure as a starting point to consider the public health ramifications.

“We just finished repairs — a half a million dollars worth of repairs on the 72 inch line that was damaged because of fluoride being injected into it at that site,” Getz said. “It’s a very caustic chemical. If you can’t afford bottled water and you have to drink out of the tap, you’re going to have fluoride in your water.”

The line that was recently repaired was a primary water pipe that Getz believes carried water to the entire city. He thinks it was near the water treatment plant. Director of Water and Sewer Operations Mike Harris could not be reached for comment.

“It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to understand that if it is caustic enough to impact the pipes,” Ward III council member Audwin Samuel trailed off. There was nervous laughter.

Getz gave a brief history of fluoridated water beginning in the 1950s. According to the CDC, Grand Rapids, Michigan was the first city to put fluoride in their water in 1945. When it proved to be a successful deterrent to tooth decay, more cities in Michigan began to inject fluoride into their public water supply. Within a few years, cities across the United States were fluoridating their water — an initiative the CDC calls “one of public health’s greatest success stories.”

But there is some debate on whether this is actually true.

According to the World Health Organization, long-term ingestion of fluoridated drinking water can cause damage to teeth and “potentially severe skeletal problems,” such as stiffness in joints, changes to the structure of the bones, calcification of ligaments and painful muscle impairments. Acute high-level exposure to fluoride can cause abdominal pain, nausea, vomiting, muscle spasms, seizures and other side effects.

“There are experts on both sides,” said city manager Kyle Hayes. “There’s a lot of opinions out there so we could probably invite someone to give (the council) both perspectives. It’s a council decision. It’s not easy because there is information all over the board.”

Neild suggested the city host a workshop to comprehensively examine this issue and make an informed decision — for the city and for the people who live in it. If the council chooses to stick with fluoridated water, fluoride itself isn’t expensive, he said. It only costs about $700 per month, or less, he estimated.

“The problem is that the stuff is so caustic, the damage it causes to the plants if you have a leak or if you have gas on the line like we did on that 72 (inch pipe) — those costs far outweigh any of the actual costs of getting the chemical in,” Neild said.

*Original article online at https://www.beaumontenterprise.com/news/article/A-lot-of-cities-have-gone-away-from-putting-16677855.php