Pawhuska city water will soon no longer be treated with fluoride, Pawhuska city councilors heard during the regular council meeting held Monday.
Pawhuska City Manager Paul McAlexander told the council an official from the Oklahoma Department of Environmental Quality contacted him recently about new water treatment plant mandates.
“One of the things that they mandated is that we have to put day — tanks in for all of our chemicals, that means we can only put in a supply that we use per day and we have to fill it every day,” McAlexander told the board. “It is a little ridiculous because it makes us handle chemicals that we never had to handle daily.”
He said up until now, the city water has been treated with polymer, caustic and fluoride, but added that no longer would fluoride be added to the water.
“One of the things we have treated with since the sixties was fluoride,” he said. “The DEQ said we did not have to treat with fluoride anymore.”
McAlexander told councilors the DEQ suggested including as an item to the City Council agenda the end of the use of fluoride so that the item would be included the minutes. The minutes would then serve as a city record of the discontinued use of fluoride in the water.
McAlexander said that with today’s use of toothpaste and other sources of fluoride, it is probably no longer necessary to add the chemical to the water.
“In the sixties, that was a good thing,” he said. “Nobody is using it now.”
He said the city really has no say in the matter of whether to discontinue the use of fluoride or not.
“We have to do it, we don’t have any choice,” said McAlexander. “They are not pushing it heavily — we just have to do it.”
McAlexander said the item would be added to the agenda for the next city council meeting.
In other news at the meeting …