San Antonio is finally getting flouride in their drinking water, a year and a half after a proposal to do so was approved by voters. The vote was the third such initiative since 1966 and was the first to overcome fierce resistance.
This article from the Express-News archives, gives a good picture of the forces at work in this battle. I was a sophomore at Trinity University when the 1985 ballot was cast. I still don’t understand the likes of C.A. Stubbs and Kay Turner, two of the leaders of the anti-flouridation movement. For the four years I lived in San Antonio, every time I read a quote in the papers from Stubbs I was struck by how little overlap there seemed to be in his universe and mine. As for Turner, whom I don’t remember, she seems to have misplaced a husband somewhere along the line:
Turner had said her marriage was to “an intelligence agent” who died without a trace in Central America while on a covert mission. During the [1997 mayoral] campaign, Turner was unable to produce a photograph, marriage license or any other record of J. Adam Walker III. Since then, she has said that another former husband, Tom Turner, threw away her records dealing with Walker.
There’s no form of entertainment quite like local goverment, y’know?
Anyway, now San Diego is apparently the largest US city to not have flouridated water. Nice to know that everything doesn’t have to be bigger here.
I was born and raised in Gadsden, AL. A land owner presented the city with a plan where the city would buy his waterfront land, and turn it into a tourist oriented park. The primary attraction was to be a WWII destroyer that was to be trucked to the site (and presumably cut to pieces and welded back together, once it arrived), and placed in the adjacent river. The tourists expected were based upon the following formula: the USS Alabama (moored in Mobile, AL), attracts X number of visitors. The destroyer was said to be half as long as the destroyer, so it would attract half as many visitors. Now, the destroyer may have been half as long, but it was about one tenth the displacement, which is a more accurate description of a ship’s size. Leaving aside the more intangible issues, one would think that the expected visitors were overstated by a factor of ten. This was seriously entertained by the city government (and, in their defense, the staff was probably unqualified to deal with many of the issues involved), but was narrowly defeated when other issues came to light.