SHREWSBURY – Shrewsbury’s H2O will remain status quo.
At Special Town Meeting on Oct. 22, elected representatives of Shrewsbury voted against Article 7, a citizens’ petition brought forward by Shrewsbury High School senior Sam Rajwani, who started the process as part of a Civic Action Project. The article asked Town Meeting to bring the question of water fluoridation to a townwide vote, the first time a referendum-style vote would have been held on the matter in Shrewsbury’s 70-year history of fluoridation.
The petition failed by a vote of 108-52.
The petition did not seek to ban fluoride from the water, though many advocates of the petition seemed to favor that outcome eventually. Had the article been approved, the ballot question would cross many desks – the Select Board and the Massachusetts General Court, for instance – before eventually making its way to voters in either 2026 or 2027.
In an effort to protect residents’ oral health, Shrewsbury started fluoridating its water in 1952. Today, Shrewsbury spends approximately $24,000 annually to fluoridate the town’s water to about 0.7 milligrams per liter – the level the U.S. Public Health Service currently recommends. In a presentation before the Finance Committee, Water and Sewer Superintendent Timothy Maroney said that the town tests water every day, with levels between 0.6 and 0.8 mg/L.
Shrewsbury’s water contains a natural amount of fluoride, estimated to be between 0.15 and 0.19 mg/L. In public comment sessions in the lead-up to Town Meeting, individuals who spoke on behalf of defluoridation said they did not oppose keeping the fluoride naturally found in the water; the debate is about the added fluoride, they argued.
Though the merits of fluoride were certainly discussed in public meetings prior to Town Meeting, the crux of the debate became about who should make the decisions for the community: the residents directly; Town Meeting, the town’s representative body; or appointed health experts like the Board of Health. Town Meeting has twice voted to keep fluoridating Shrewsbury water, though those articles had severe legal flaws.
For Rajwani, the petition was about giving residents a voice.
“I’m not asking you to decide whether you want fluoride in the water. Rather, I’m asking you to let the residents decide for the first time in our town’s history. In the 73 years since we’ve started fluoridating our water, an abundance of studies have come out that relate ingesting fluoride to a slew of negative health effects, especially an effect on the IQ of children,” Rajwani said through a statement read at a Finance Committee meeting.
However, opponents of the article argued that leaving medical decisions to the town at-large would be unwise.
“This article seeks to reopen something that Town Meeting has already decided twice and frames it as ‘promoting democracy and transparency.’ Letting the people decide every issue through a popular vote is not the foundation of our democracy, and this article doesn’t necessarily strengthen our democracy. I see this article as undermining the Board of Health by asking voters to make a complex scientific decision without the benefit of understanding,” said Select Board Vice-Chair Beth Casavant, who joined the majority (3-2) of the Select Board in opposing the article.
Added Vikram Singh, a Finance Committee member: “There’s a lot of discussion about this. All I would like to say is that without a proper justification, to open it up to the residents, it’s extremely dangerous. … At some point, we have to depend upon the experts. Opinions are important, but science is not opinion – science is fact.”
Original article online at: https://www.communityadvocate.com/news/town-meeting-strikes-down-plan-for-referendum-on-fluoridation-of-shrewsbury-water/article_27db5602-fd9b-4f69-9dbd-a63a122d895b.html