The day following the Feb. 5 publication of Oviedo Community News’ story about Oviedo water fluoridation, Oviedo Public Works Director Bobby Wyatt sent an email to City Council members — with no additional notice to the Oviedo public from city officials or accounts — stating it had stopped its fluoridation temporarily due to issues with the system.
“There was no decision made [to pause fluoridation],” Wyatt said in an email response to OCN. “There was an equipment failure that stopped the introduction of fluoride into the water supply.”
The fluoride dosing equipment issues actually began around December 2023 or January 2024, according to Wyatt. The dosing was halted and restarted in July, ran through August and the beginning of September, when it was halted once again due to equipment failure. It has been “primarily off-line since,” Wyatt said in an email to OCN.
Oviedo Mayor Megan Sladek and Deputy Mayor Natalie Teuchert said the email to Council, sent Feb. 6, was the first they had heard about the system having an issue and fluoridation needing to be stopped, and neither had been told of a concrete date that it was halted. The email did say that the Florida Department of Health was notified, as per requirements.
“I truly thought it was maybe a week or something off that they sat on this then told us,” Sladek said.
After learning Wednesday that the system has been having issues for more than a year, and “primarily” offline since September, Sladek said she was left “speechless that this would have been going on since December 2023 and nobody thought, ‘Hey, let’s tip somebody off that we need additional budget to continue the status quo.”
“I said, ‘Look, y’all need to do something from the city’s end and just lay out the whole timeline so people know what’s going on,’” she said. “Even I don’t know what’s going on.
“Because [fluoride] is a very newsy kind of issue, I am surprised that we were not notified sooner,” she said. “I am surprised.”
The lack of communication continued even after City Council was notified on Feb. 6 — in an email that did not reveal how long the system had been having issues or was halted.
“I thought the city [was] going to have some kind of plan for [public] outreach,” said Sladek, who posted about it on Facebook following the Feb. 24 work session, nearly three weeks after Wyatt’s email was sent. “Hypothetically [with public records] it was discoverable as soon as it happened.
“It is something that needs to be out there,” she said.
However, that was apparently not the plan from city staff.
“There was no discussion about the equipment failure, as at the time of the failure, our Public Works Department was working on a plan to fix the equipment and there were no health safety issues by stopping fluoridation of the water,” Oviedo Public Information Officer Lisa McDonald said in an email to OCN.
“This is a topic [which] we owe it to the public to discuss it publicly,” Sladek said. “I would have pushed that topic much earlier had I known that we had changed what we thought was happening.
“Parents need to know [updates about fluoridation] so they can do what they think is right,” she said.
Fluoride, a mineral both naturally found in water and added to nearly three-quarters of all community water systems in the United States — including Oviedo’s — has been shown to help prevent cavities and tooth decay. In 1995 the Oviedo City Council officially began implementing a fluoridation system.
In its 2023 Annual Drinking Water Quality Report, Oviedo detected fluoride levels of 0.69 ppm in its water system. In both 2021 and 2022 it detected 0.52 ppm levels. Both are below the accepted 0.7 ppm United States standard level of fluoride for proper health benefits as per U.S. Public Health Service guidelines.
“I think we have a communication breakdown that we need to address,” Sladek said. “For some people, maybe this is a small fish, but for other people it is a very significant fish.”
City Council discussed the next steps for the system repairs at its Feb. 24 work session.
The Feb. 6 email to Council said “one way this is checked is an Operator will perform laboratory tests to ‘confirm’ the analyzer readings. When the readings don’t match, dosing is halted. As such, and in the consideration of safety, Fluoride dosing has been halted until either the equipment is repaired to a level that staff can be confident with or the units are replaced.”
The recently filed “Florida Farm Bill,” which was filed in both the state House and Senate, could bar the adding of fluoride to water supplies by public water systems in Florida, putting a wrench into Oviedo’s plans to repair the equipment.
At the work session, Oviedo City Council agreed to hold off on determining the next steps for handling the system — city staff investigated and determined the best option would be a complete system replacement as per the manufacturer, which would cost around $300,000 — until the state’s Legislative session was complete.
“If the bill doesn’t go through, we can have this discussion and make the decision based on what we want to do vs. should we risk the $300,000 right now,” Teuchert said.
After the work session discussion, Justin Robert, from We Are Change Orlando, a group advocating for fluoride removal from Florida water systems, sent a message on X, formerly known as Twitter, saying “Oviedo voted to leave the system broken due to new state bills to ban fluoride in FL!”
There, in fact, was no official vote at the work session, as the Council only agreed to table the discussion on replacing the system until the Farm Bill is decided upon. The last day of the Florida Legislative session is May 2.
Until then, there will be no water fluoridation in Oviedo. However, City Manager Bryan Cobb stressed at the meeting that the reason for it is “because it’s not safe with the broken analyzer.”
“With the broken analyzer, we can’t say for sure that we’re getting the right dosing,” he said.
The four Council members present at the work session unanimously agreed to reopen the discussion for replacing the system if the Farm Bills are not passed.
“I think the point is you don’t want to spend $300,000 to get it fixed and then they pass these two bills and all of a sudden we’ve got to dismantle the thing,” council member Jeff Boddiford said.
As the City Council waits for the fate of the bills, Sladek said the temporary aspect of the hold until the end of the Legislative session was the right decision.
“I think what we did was very rational,” Sladek said.
However, the lack of communication is an issue, Sladek said.
“It is something people feel so strongly about on both sides,” Sladek said. “You’ve got to tell people.”
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