The Olivenhain Municipal Water District needs to suspend its water fluoridation program for up to 90 days to look into employee safety concerns, a majority of the district’s board decided Wednesday.

While the topic of putting fluoride into drinking water has been a hot-button political issue of late and President Trump’s Health & Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is encouraging states to ban fluoride in drinking water contending it’s a toxic substance, OMWD board member Christy Guerin said the board’s action Wednesday wasn’t political.

Instead, it was in response to safety concerns related to handling of the huge fluoride bags, said Guerin, a former Encinitas mayor and formerly worked as a district director for former U.S. Rep. Brian Bilbray, R-Carlsbad.

“The operators have made it clear how dangerous this is,” she said after the district’s plant director gave a slideshow presentation of the multi-step process that employees follow to put the 2,200-pound bags of powdered fluoride into the treatment plant’s processing system, a process that happens about once a week during peak summer water use periods.

Guerin was on the water board 15 years ago when it made the decision to establish the fluoridation program and said it was “a difficult decision” because “many people in the community were not happy” with it. At Wednesday’s meeting, she initially made a motion to pursue stopping the program permanently. That proposal, which would require State Water Control Board approval, was on the agenda and had been recommended by district staff, in part as a cost-saving measure.

If the board had taken that action, it would have been the first termination of a water fluoridation program in San Diego County, district officials said.

After Guerin’s motion failed to win a second, board member Scott Maloni put forward the temporary suspension proposal, saying they couldn’t “leave this operator safety issue unaddressed.” He said a temporary suspension would allow the district to see if it can improve its process for putting the big bags of powdered fluoride into the water treatment system, as well as time to seek more information on fluoride bag suppliers and other fluoride-related issues. Earlier in the evening, he said that he didn’t believe fluoridation was harmful, but the district’s customer base is wealthy with access to topical fluoride treatments and might not need fluoridated water.

As long as the suspension lasts less than 90 days, the district will not need to seek permission from the State Water Control Board, district General Manager Kimberly Thorner said.

While the board’s majority said the temporary suspension was a good idea, board member Neal Meyers said he didn’t see why the district was suddenly pursuing this course of action. OMWD has operated its water fluoridation program for 13 years and has never had an employee injury or hazard exposure report during that period, he noted. Thorner confirmed his statement.

Meyers said the only actual safety issue now being reported is that the powdered fluoride bags recently delivered to the treatment plant by outside contractors sometimes have cuts in the plastic. During their presentation, district management employees showed a photo of one bag tear incident involving a small amount of fluoride powder that spilled onto a wooden pallet. They said they’ve had several other tears on bags in the past year or so. The bags come from China, the only place where the district currently can obtain 2,200-pound bags of fluoride, they said.

In the recent spill incident, district employees alerted the truck driver, told him they couldn’t accept the bag because of the tear and then took proper safety precautions during the cleanup, so there doesn’t seem to be any reason to seek an emergency suspension, Meyers said, adding, “In my view, our safety practices work.”

Prior to Wednesday’s meeting, the board had received dozens of e-mails, both from fluoride supporters and opponents, but only proponents — 18 in all — spoke in person or online via ZOOM during the meeting. Many of them were dentists and they stressed that tooth decay problems, particularly among young children, have drastically decreased nationally in the decades since fluoridation began. They said there was ample scientific evidence that fluoridation worked, and said the district would regret cancelling its program, mentioning that Calgary did so in 2011 and has recently reversed its decision due rising rates of childhood dental decay.

District employees didn’t have a start date for the temporary suspension on Wednesday. OMWD covers a 48-square-mile area and serves about 87,000 water customers in Encinitas, Carlsbad, San Diego, Solana Beach, and neighboring communities, the district’s web site states.