Long considered a Democratic stronghold, Pueblo Republicans have been making gains in recent years, winning down-ballot municipal and county races, while turning Colorado Senate District 3 into one of next year’s most contested statehouse seats. This week, Pueblo Republicans gathered at the Lamb Library to hear from candidates for District 60 Board of Education, Pueblo City Council, and the Pueblo Water Board.
“I really know nothing about water,” said Dave DeCenzo, running for Water Board. “You can take that as a joke, but it isn’t.”
DeCenzo, host of the KOYC radio show “Pueblo Matters,” is a longtime conservative activist. In 2019 DeCenzo was part of the failed effort to recall then-Senate President Leroy Garcia over his votes for legislation rewriting Colorado oil and gas regulations and another signing Colorado onto the national popular vote compact.
“One of the things that people have talked to me about and complained is that they don’t want fluoride in their water,” said DeCenzo, sporting a red hat emblazoned with “Make Pueblo Healthy Again,” a variation of U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr’s slogan. “Fluoride would be something that we add. The law, I think, is — or the standard amount to put in is 0.7 milligrams per liter, which I don’t know how much that is. I guess it’s 7,700 micrograms, I think, per water. But it’s intended to fix your teeth and to get rid of the excess fluoride that’s produced in industry so that they can actually make some money back from it. But I’m not convinced, and maybe the other members of the Water Board would convince me that that’s a mistake to do that. And so I’m open, but I would like to reduce it just so that people have less fluoride that’s delivered to them without their knowing it.”
Earlier this year, Kennedy announced plans to tell the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to stop recommending fluoridation in communities nationwide. In May the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) announced that it is initiating action to remove concentrated ingestible fluoride prescription drug products for children from the market.
Conservative groups like the John Birch Society have long raised baseless concerns about fluoride in drinking water. The fluoridation conspiracy was most notably used in Stanley Kubrick 1964 film “Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb,” in which an Air Force general starts World War III because he believes the Soviets have been fluoridating American water supplies to pollute the “precious bodily fluids” of Americans.
“Ending the use of ingestible fluoride is long overdue,” said Kennedy in a news release. “This decision brings us one step closer to delivering on President Trump’s promise to Make America Healthy Again.”
Daniel McHenry, running for D60 Board of Education, expressed his support for school choice.
“If there’s a failing public school, well, there’s other options,” said McHenry. “There’s competition in the marketplace for public education. Public education is what matters. That’s what we’re delivering to these children, whatever vehicle they use to get there, and whatever tools we have at our access to help them achieve that education. I don’t want one dime to be spent in the classroom or by District 60 that does not advance the mission academically educating our children K-12.”
School choice has been a hot topic in the district. Recently, former Colorado Board of Education member and Republican Senate candidate, Stephen Varela, hoped to launch a new charter school in Pueblo’s District 60 at the site of the former Chávez Huerta Preparatory Academy. The D60 board voted during an Aug. 12 meeting not to grant a waiver to Varela’s proposal, which would involve external manager ACCEL Schools.
In 2023, conservative activist group Forging Pueblo’s political committee, Forging the Future, supported multiple candidates for Pueblo D60 Board of Education. Two of those candidates, Sue Pannunzio and Brian Cisneros, won election to the board. In October, Pannunzio and Cisneros voted in support of a policy requiring parental notification for non-legal name changes, which contradicted an existing 2016 policy and which received widespread opposition from community members who argued the policy put LGBTQ youth at risk.
“If I’m sitting on the school board, I will advocate for students getting a quality education every day, all day, every day,” said McHenry in closing. “To the exclusion of other things that do not advance that specific ideal. I will advocate for and do what I can to protect girls’ sports. There’s no room in girls’ sports for boys to be competing against girls in girls’ sports.”
