Oviedo changes protocols after long fluoride system shutdowns

Following revelations earlier this month that Oviedo’s water fluoridation system had been down for the majority of the last year without notice to the City Council or the public, the Public Works Department is making changes to internal protocols.

Oviedo residents voted for the city’s water to be fluoridated in 1974, though the system wasn’t activated until 1995. After operating for decades, city records and staff statements suggest the system began to break down sometime between December 2023 and January 2024, though the City Council was only alerted to the issue this February, more than a year later.

The subsequent pausing of the water fluoridation “dosing” program wasn’t brought to the city manager or City Council’s attention because, as staff put it, it wasn’t an urgent matter of public health or safety. Public Works Director Bobby Wyatt said he was “aware they weren’t dosing” at the “beginning of January” 2025, and “that’s where I got involved.”

Oviedo Deputy Mayor Natalie Teuchert said in an email to Wyatt that not being informed put the City Council “into a bad spot from lack of info,” and “citizens should be aware we aren’t dosing the water.”

Oviedo’s Public Works Department was recognized during the March 3 City Council meeting for its work, with a Flood Awareness Week proclamation. Director Bobby Wyatt is in the middle (Photo via City of Oviedo’s Facebook)

In a Feb. 27 email response to Teuchert, Wyatt wrote:

“I just learned the ‘rest of the story’ this past Tuesday. The City Manager was informed immediately and as quickly as I could prepare the information it was provided to Council. In hindsight I should have dug deeper when the issue was first presented to me, but I understood it as a recent occurrence. I have already discussed with staff the types of information I need to know in order to keep Council informed. There is no excusing the situation as it presents bad optics. However, there is no malicious intent. Staff was doing their job as they always do, but the details I need to know weren’t shared; not to hide it but because from the operation/maintenance perspective it wasn’t thought to share it with me.”

Oviedo Mayor Megan Sladek said “the communication breakdown” was “exceptionally not OK.”

When to notify

Wyatt said that “critical” issues are brought to his attention “if it’s an urgency, and we address it right away.

“Normally what happens is staff will come tell me to my face, ‘Hey, we’ve got a problem, we need to address this,’ and we act on it right away,” he said. “They never brought it to my attention as … an urgent need to replace.”

When asked whether something that was voted for and is a long-standing public policy is paused for extended periods of time should be communicated to the public and City Council, Wyatt said “Yes.”

“I think anything other than fluoride would’ve been brought to my attention as an emergency issue as far as service and delivery to residents, and would’ve been addressed immediately,” he said. 

The city said that if the system was overdosing rather than underdosing, it would have risen to the level of a “health safety issue” and be communicated to the public.

“I can’t speak to the 1970s [when it was voted for by Oviedo residents] and fluoride as a health issue, but when I have raw sewage on the ground or a water main that’s broken and I can’t provide service, that’s on a much higher level of emergency than if I’m able to add fluoride, which is an additive to the water system,” he said.  

Not communicating the issue had left elected officials uneasy.

“It is a significant issue of public trust,” Sladek said. “Even though perhaps nobody’s life was in danger, it’s an incredible breach of public trust for people to, for [the majority of] 15 months, think the water’s being fluoridated and not have that to be the case.

“If one can forget something that is as politically a hot-button an issue as fluoride, there could be other things. … I don’t know what else might be forgotten.”

Wyatt said that when he first learned the system was not dosing, he “understood it to be that it was a recent issue.”

Following Florida Surgeon General Dr. Joseph Ladapo’s Nov. 22 guidance about fluoridation, groups speaking about fluoride at the Jan. 6 Oviedo Council meeting, the Feb. 4 announcement and Feb. 13 filing of the 2025 Florida Farm Bill that could prohibit fluoride statewide, and multiple inquiries by OCN, Wyatt sent the City Council email updates about the system being paused on Feb. 6 and Feb. 26. In the first email, the timing of the issue was unclear, but Sladek said it read as if it was very recent while, in the second email, more details revealed that it was down intermittently in 2024, and paused since September.

Oviedo resident Agnieszka Francis spoke at the Jan. 6 Oviedo City Council meeting about her concerns regarding water fluoridation.

It was revealed during the March 3 meeting that the system had in fact been paused for all but about three months over the previous year.

“It was on all of the politicians’ radar, and so items like that, I’m familiar with and sensitive to, and had I known about it [earlier] it would’ve been shared,” Wyatt said.

Currently, the future of the fluoridation system is in a holding pattern, as the City Council said they do not want to make a decision on fixing it until after the Florida Legislature decides on the Farm Bill. The legislative session ends May 2.

Teuchert said there will be continued discussion on the timeline “discrepancies,” but agrees with the communication protocol changes. 

“We are only as good as the information we have to make decisions with,” she said. “We definitely need to find an answer and make sure this doesn’t happen again, and why it happened in the first place.”

Through interviews and public records requests that included analysis of more than 900 emails, OCN put together a timeline of the fluoridation communications and long-term issues with the system. 

Communication confusion

At the March 3 City Council meeting, Assistant Public Works Director/City Engineer Alexis Stewart and Utilities Manager Steve Santiago told the Council the system had actually only been functioning as expected for three months since at least the beginning of 2024. Prior to their presentation, Wyatt told the Council he had only recently learned of the extent of the issues with the system and told the Council he was copied on an email that made reference to issues with the system’s analyzers, “and I honestly don’t remember it.”

Sladek said that is not an acceptable answer for her.

”It’s not OK to forget at the end of the day,” she said. “It’s not OK to not recall it. It is his job to recall. … The director is the communication key between all the people who are doers and the people who have to set the policy and make sure that the budget is available for the doing to happen. So that’s a critical failure to forget that you have a failed system and just forgot to tell anybody about that.

”I don’t doubt that he really forgot, but it doesn’t make it OK to forget to do a critical component of one’s job,” she said. 

The email in question was a response to a Nov. 25 inquiry by an Orlando Sentinel reporter. When OCN initially asked the city for the document Wyatt mentioned, the email provided did not include any discussion of the fluoride dosing analyzers.

A schematic of how the Oviedo’s fluoride system works (diagram via City of Oviedo)

However, through public records requests, OCN obtained the chain of emails that led to those answers being sent back to the Sentinel. In them, the reporter asked the city multiple questions, including, “Has that amount remained consistent, or has Oviedo changed the amount of fluoride?”

On Nov. 26, Wyatt personally directed a staff member over email to “please provide answers to the questions below and then send back only to me and Alexis [Stewart] to review.”

The answer the staff member sent back to Wyatt — with Stewart and two other staff members included on the email — about whether the amount of fluoride had remained consistent, was: “no, due to analyzer and equipment failures.”

Following this, Stewart sent the responses to Oviedo Public Information Officer Lisa McDonald, but the answer to the question regarding the amount of fluoride was different. It had been rewritten to say, simply, “Changed.” 

Stewart said she shortened and reworded the answer to more directly respond to the exact question. Wyatt said, “the honest answer is, I forgot about it. And at the time, there was no warning flags about it needing to be replaced right away when I saw it.”

Still “a problem” 

He said he apologized to the Council during the March 3 meeting because there was an email and he “did not remember” it.

“It was an item related to the Council they wanted to discuss, and I honestly did not remember the email,” he said. “That’s the honest, simplest answer. I’m very responsible for my department.”

City Manager Bryan Cobb said department directors “should be informed” on communications that go out to the public or the press, and are expected to have final approval after working with the public information officer on the messaging.

While Deputy Mayor Tuechert said, “I can’t answer to someone’s memory” and Wyatt is “not an absent public works director,” she does say there was a timeline discrepancy and a breakdown in communication.

“It does appear that there was communication about this before we were told about it … that email alludes to that. They knew there was an issue with it as far as when we had discussions in council,” she said. “It is a problem.”

A known issue 

The November 2024 email chain is not the first time staff has discussed issues internally with the Oviedo fluoride system. In fact, the problems with the system seemingly date back years. 

The West Mitchell Hammock Water Treatment facility fluoridation analyzer system, part of Oviedo’s fluoride system (Photo via City of Oviedo)

Emails dating back to 2020 and more recently, throughout 2024, show that the West Mitchell Hammock Water Treatment Plant and Public Works staff had long known about the analyzers not functioning properly. There are numerous compliance reports sent to the Florida Department of Health (DOH) that state “equipment malfunction” as the reason fluoride levels are lower than the expected 0.7 mg/L, beginning in November 2023, and emails from at least 2022 mention the analyzer issues.

The emails to the DOH, referencing Hach, a water quality monitoring company, say “the water plant is still working with Hach company to solve the reliability of the online analyzer. The system cannot safely inject fluoride without a reliable online analyzer.” 

Greg McCue, compliance and project administrator for Oviedo’s utilities, wrote in a Feb. 28 email that “even during start up [more than 15 years ago] the Hach fluoride analyzers were problematic.”

Through 2024, staff was working on potential fixes, even receiving quotes for potential improvements, but they were never implemented.

The analyzers were being serviced regularly and, according to Wyatt, not mentioned as an urgent need, while another component, the skid, a self-contained fluoride pump system, was brought up in meetings.

Wyatt said non-urgent items that are in need of replacement are programmed into the department’s yearly capital improvement plan.

“All of the equipment has to work together, and the skids were aging infrastructure that needed to be replaced. The analyzers had failures, and they have a semi-annual service contract, and they were continually being serviced,” Stewart said. “They would fall out of service, and then it was a consistent maintenance issue where the skids are operational. They’re on the CIP to [be] replace[d], because they’re aging.

“Each component can be replaced at different times.”

A Feb. 26, 2024 email from McCue shows staff was working on price quotes for both the analyzers and skid system so he could “have this information so if DOH starts inquiring of when our [fluoride] injection system will be up and running again.”

Wyatt said that the optimal time it would have been communicated to him was “if there was a determination that the analyzers were having repeated issues and we were having problems with the maintenance service and how quickly they were getting repaired, at some point they should have brought it up and, just, we replace the whole system.”

Despite the communication confusion, Wyatt said he has full faith in his staff.

“These guys were doing their job, and we’ve now addressed things that I might need to know about and that’s been taken care of,” he said. “You will find no better, competent, capable staff anywhere than the staff we have. They do so much with so little.”