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2015 YEAR IN REVIEW
FRIDAY, JANUARY 1, 2016
SPECIAL COMMEMORATIVE SECTION OF THE PENINSULA DAILY NEWS
Fight over water treatment to persist?/
CONTINUED
The survey sent in November to 9,762 water customers was returned by 4,204. Of those, 2,381, or 56.64 percent, rejected water fluoridation, while 1,735, or 41.27 percent, favored it.
The City Council had decided in July to get public input through an advisory survey of water customers, rather than through an advisory measure on the Nov. 3 ballot, so as to allow
responses from water customers outside city limits. After the council vote, a key opponent promised to keep fighting. “Don’t pack away your fluoride papers quite yet,” the council was warned by
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Dr. Eloise Kailin, corresponding secretary of Protect the Peninsula’s Future, which, along with Clallam County Citizens for Safe Drinking Water, has unsuccessfully challenged Port Angeles water fluoridation in court. Kailin also headed a city committee opposing fluoridation while Dr. Tom Locke, the public health officer for Jefferson County, headed a committee supporting it. The city held a forum on the issue in October. Proponents say fluoride in the water helps fight tooth decay. Opponents say the practice doesn’t work, that it harms health and constitutes putting medication into drinking water. The city began adding fluoride into the water system in 2006. The action was paid for by a grant from the Washington Dental Service Foundation.
Forks is the only other city on the North Olympic Peninsula that fluoridates its water. It has done so since 1956.
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BUILDING BOOM: New construction could be seen springing up all over Clallam County in 2015. In April, nearly 200 West End residents celebrated the grand opening of the $2.1 million, 6,300-square-foot Rainforest Arts Center in Forks. The building at 35 N. Forks Ave. replaced the community’s arts center in the 70-year-old International Order of Odd Fellows Hall, which burned 2½ years earlier. Olympic Medical Center is presently constructing a new 42,000-square-foot, $14.2 million medical office building across from the Port Angeles hospital at 939
Caroline St., has just finished expanding the hospital’s emergency room and is eyeing an expansion of the hospital’s Sequim facilities. The new emergency room opened in September, the office building is expected to be completed by next fall and the Sequim expansion is expected in 2017. In December, OMC neighbor Palmer “Jack” McCarter donated his house at 1035 Columbia St. to the hospital. Officials plan to use the area for office space, parking and relocation of its helicopter landing pad, used by Airlift Northwest. In August, Peninsula College broke ground on a 41,650-square-foot, $25 million building for the Allied Health and Early Childhood Development Center at its Port Angeles campus. PLEASE
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