A former St. Louis fire captain with leadership experience at the federal, state and local levels will run the City Emergency Management Agency.
Mayor Cara Spencer announced Monday that she has selected Gregg Favre to be the next CEMA commissioner. Favre will replace John Walk, who has served in the role in an acting capacity since May 20.
“A strong and well-prepared CEMA is vital for the future of St. Louis, and with Gregg Favre, our city is bringing a public servant with decades of experience at high levels of government and public safety into this important leadership position,” Spencer said in a statement.
Favre is a St. Louis native who earned undergraduate degrees from the University of Central Missouri. He also has a master’s degree in emergency management from George Washington University.
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 Regional Response System, which coordinates emergency response among the area’s fractured public safety system.
Favre called it an honor to be the city’s new CEMA commissioner.
“Mayor Spencer has given me a clear mission: build an agency worthy of St. Louisans’ trust through investments in professional staff, technology that reaches every neighborhood and partnerships that turn crisis response into coordinated action,” he said in a statement. “St. Louis has weathered storms before, and this moment demands that we match our city’s resilience with systems that put public safety first and leave no neighborhood behind.”
He is expected to start in the new role next month.
CEMA, which currently has four full-time employees, was in the spotlight in the immediate aftermath of the May 16 tornado when the outdoor warning sirens failed to sound. The city acknowledged human failure and placed former CEMA Commissioner Sarah Russell on leave.
An investigation by an outside law firm found “multiple cascading failures” that went beyond staff members being out of the office that day. Even if the sirens had been activated, more than a third of them were not functional for a variety of reasons. And the city had not updated its emergency operations plan since 2003, when Francis Slay was mayor. That led to a lack of coordination and organization in the immediate response.
Russell was fired shortly after the report was released.
