Speaker: Marilyn Leistner
Former Mayor (1981–1985)
Times Beach, Missouri

My name is Marilyn Leistner, and I am the last mayor of a community in St. Louis County known as Times Beach, Missouri. I served as the mayor until 1985, when Governor John Ashcroft appointed me trustee to oversee the buyout of the community.

In 1982 the community learned on November the 11th that Times Beach was possibly sprayed with dioxin by a waste oil hauler. In 1974 the government knew that the dioxin was there. The government did nothing because they thought that the dioxin would go away in a year. Soon they would learn that it would take 100 years for the sun to degrade the dioxin. From then, the community proceeded to be overlooked.

In 1982 the community suffered the worst flood of its history. On my way home from work, when I heard them on the radio say that the people in the low-lying areas need to start to evacuate because the river was going to flood, and it was just that day I got a call at work from the city clerk saying that a reporter had called and said that our community was on a list of sites suspected to have been sprayed with dioxin. My first thought was, “Nah, there’s no dioxin in Times Beach.” After about two weeks of talking with people and listening to health problems, I called Russell Bliss, who was the company that sprayed the waste oil on our streets. And I asked him, “Did you spray our streets with an oil laced with dioxin, PCBs, and other chemicals?” And he said, “Marilyn, I will bet you two weeks’ pay that there’s no dioxin in Times Beach.” Unfortunately, I’ve never collected his two weeks’ pay, but the dioxin was there. On December 23rd of 1982 the EPA and the Missouri Department of Health and the CDC notified the people that the dioxin was there, to leave, and to not come back. At that time, the state of Missouri decided they were going to do a health study on the residents. And they kind of determined from that study that they didn’t see anything that was harmful. It’s difficult for me to say that the dioxin hasn’t caused any health problems in that community because I’ve seen too many friends and neighbors with health problems.

We were ostracized by people in our neighboring community. A front-page newspaper article said, “dioxin, the most potent chemical known to man,” and as a result of that article, the people from Times Beach were looked at as being contaminated and contagious. It was a type of community where, if I sent my kids out on the street, there were 100 mothers that would watch after them, and unfortunately, people saw that it was a ragtag community, but it was not. It was a beautiful community, and there were some beautiful people that lived there. I would go back tomorrow if I could.