depends on the tap water. chlorine and chloromine only kills bacteria if its concentrated enough. where i'm at. my girls like tap water more than ro water. its weird and i don't undertsand it but it works. when i used ro water i got mag an cal deficiencies and the leaves would dry out. i was using black strap molasses too. which has way more cal and mag in it than calmag or calplex. chlorine is a catch 22. it kills bacteria but it also stimulates root growth.
Do you add mykos?
It really doesn't take much chlorination to kill microbes, especially the good ones. Concentrations below 1 ppm will begin to kill bacteria; but even higher concentrations than that are required to be effective against other organisms (such as giardia and cryptosporidium). What complicates this is the fact that free chlorine is highly reactive and forms toxic compounds (trihalomethanes along with other disinfection by-poducts) on contact with organic matter, which is why chloramines are increasingly used in conjunction with free chlorine. By the time the water comes out of the faucet much of the free chlorine may have reacted or dissipated but that doesn't mean what remains (the residual concentration) wont still kill microbes, especially where chloramines are used. If you can smell the chlorination in your tap water it is certainly strong enough to kill microbes\hinder microbial proliferation.
Killing microbes is the very point of chlorinating the water in the first place and using chloramines ensures there wont be any proliferation even as the water comes out of the faucet. And if you can smell the chlorine the concentration is higher than 3 ppm. What exactly your water dept. is saying I have no idea but according to folks who know a hell of a lot more than me and you bacteria will be damaged well before 3 ppm, that is just around what the WHO recommends for disinfecting drinking water. Of course it takes longer to kill certain microbes at lower concentrations, but for our purposes it can't be helping.