By Linda Taaffe

Mountain View

retired Mountain View nurse launched a petition last week that could ban the city from adding fluoride to its drinking water.

Billie Barewald filed a proposed ordinance at Mountain View City Hall last Thursday that asks voters to reverse the city’s current water fluoridation laws in the November 2002 election.

The city has two weeks to respond with the proper wording for such a ballot measure.

The city began fluoridating its water last March.

Once the city responds, Barewald will need to collect signatures from at least 10 percent of the city’s 33,000 registered voters within 180 days or the ordinance cannot be placed on the ballot.

City passes fluoridation law

This is the second time voters will be asked to decide the content of their water supply. Santa Clara County in 1998 asked Mountain View to fluoridate its water supply because funding for the project had become available. It was one of the few cities in California to receive grant funding to cover $540,000 of the $1.4 million in the expenses related to fluoridation and the first Santa Clara County city in the past 29 years to fluoridate its water supply.

The council made a unanimous decision to fluoridate the city’s water supply, pending the results of an advisory ballot measure in 1998 that residents supported the concept of water fluoridation by about a 10,000-vote margin during an advisory vote in November 1998.

Collecting signatures

Barewald said she knows collecting the 3,300 needed signatures won’t be easy, but she is intent on pushing for such an ordinance.

Barewald said she believes that the public wasn’t well-educated about fluoride’s possible health hazards the first time around.

She said the vote was tainted by misinformation from fluoride proponents who outspent opponents by a 10-to-one margin, allegedly using special-interest money.

“I first got interested in the effects of fluoride when I was a young mother and nurse,” she said.

“My child had severe stomach aches … It turned out that it was from fluoride pills.”

Barewald called the notion of adding fluoride to water “lunacy.” She said the Physician’s Desk Reference even includes the health hazards of fluoride.

Barewald isn’t alone in her crusade. She and other Mountain View residents, calling themselves the Mountain View Citizens for Safe Drinking Water, have banded together to educate the public about fluoride’s side effects through the Web site www.nofluoride.com.

Resident David Lamar challenged the council’s decision in court last year. The State Supreme Court recently declined the case.

While every other Bay Area urban county is substantially fluoridated, Santa Clara County has never been more than 12 percent fluoridated. At present, Stanford, Palo Alto and the Evergreen neighborhood in San Jose are the only fluoridated-water areas in the county.