Gregg Favre has spent most of his professional life in public service.
While with the St. Louis Fire Department, Favre was the incident commander for special events. He served as a deputy director of public safety under former Gov. Eric Greitens, and then went on to lead the St. Louis Area Regional Response System, which coordinates emergency response among the area’s fractured public safety system.
Mayor Cara Spencer hired him in November to lead the City Emergency Management Agency. The tiny department came under scrutiny in the aftermath of the devastating May 16 tornado; its previous permanent head, Sarah Russell, was fired in August for their performance.
Favre was born and raised in south St. Louis and still lives there. He told St. Louis Public Radio’s Rachel Lippmann in a recent interview that he returned to the city administration from a job with the federal government, which brought a pay cut, because he cares about its success.
“If the city does well, the region and the state does well,” he said. “There have long been needed investments in our public safety architecture, not just at CEMA, but across the board. It felt like a time to actually come in and have some years where we can get some really substantive work in an area that desperately needs it.”
The following conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Rachel Lippmann: You’ve worked closely with CEMA in your previous roles. How has your time leading the agenda reshaped your understanding of the agency?
Gregg Favre: If you were to have asked me when I was first approached about taking this job, I would have told you that there were substantive improvements needed in the actual public safety work – the emergency management policy and procedure, the planning process, the mitigation process, the preparedness process.
What I can tell you now, having just finished my fourth full week with the agency, is that there are substantive organizational pieces that have not been in place that need to be in place. We have to dig into the bedrock and, in what is essentially a rebuilding process, make sure that all of that is aligned with best practices. It isn’t right now.
CEMA has been underfunded and understaffed since its inception. I’ve been very clear with the mayor and the director of public safety that we either need to rightsize the organization or we need to right size the mission and pull back from some of the things that the city would like us or needs us to do.
Lippmann: How far off is the city from a fully staffed CEMA?
Favre: CEMA, as it stands at the end of January, has six full-time employees. Three of those positions, one of which is me, are filled. We need, at minimum, 11 to 12 people to manage just the basic trains of emergency management. Best practices would put us at about 15.
Lippmann: Given the needs of St. Louis and its budget situation, what makes more sense – rightsizing the staff or rightsizing the mission?
Favre: Rightsizing the staff is absolutely where I would put my marker if I were the budget director.
Lippmann: What are the options if the city cannot rightsize the staff?
Favre: That’s a difficult question to answer without knowing what tasks would remain in our wheelhouse. Other cities have combined emergency management with either their police or fire departments. That was one of the recommendations in the report released last August, and it’s an option that continues to be discussed in the mayor’s office.
However, if we were to go under a different city agency to better use the resources that agency already has, which is a valid argument, we would need to maintain our mission focus and our lane.
Lippmann: I am sure that you have read the external report on the May 16 siren failure multiple times. What questions were left unanswered?
Favre: They had a really good line early in the report - they said “multiple cascading failures” led to the results out of CEMA on the day of the tornado and in the immediate aftermath. In the last four weeks at the agency, that makes a lot of sense to me.
What I think is left unanswered, and what is my job to work with others to figure out, is how far back those cascading failures go.
Lippmann: Have you found anything in those first four weeks that contradicts or adds to the finding of the report?
Favre: Nothing that contradictions anything. I do think that there are elements we need to dive deeper on. They were highlighted pretty extensively in the report, and I want to dig in a little bit more and see if what is there is as bad as it reads.
Lippmann: What are some of those areas?
Favre: I think our ability to convene partners when things are an emergency is absolutely something that we need to get much tighter.
Lippmann: What concerns you the most about the role the federal government has taken in disaster preparedness, response and recovery under the second Trump administration?
Favre: As someone who has worked with the Federal Emergency Management Agency in various capacities since the early 2000s, I would be disappointed if we saw substantive changes to their structure without consulting emergency management and public safety professionals at length. There are conversations to be had about ways to make FEMA more efficient, better resourced and better tasked, but they’re worth having with the larger emergency management community, not done unilaterally as if all they provide is a line item on a budget.
Lippmann: What can the St. Louis Board of Aldermen do to help make the city more resilient as climate change leads to more frequent and potentially more severe natural disasters?
Favre: I don’t think I’m in a position four weeks in to necessarily have that strategy fully built out. But there is absolutely a role for elected officials around preparedness, mitigation and better understanding emergency operations.
In my personal opinion, I think one of the reasons CEMA has been underfunded, under-resourced and understaffed for so long is that emergency management, by and large, is kind of boring. We’re part of the public safety architecture, but we’re not as front and center as the police or fire departments.
I’ve shared with the mayor that we are probably looking at a two-year rebuild for CEMA. We are always going to prioritize life and safety every single day, first and foremost. But we need staff and a strategy to get us from where we are to where we need to be, and that’s going to take time.
