Sunday will mark six months since a tornado ripped across the St. Louis area, causing generational damage to portions of north St. Louis.
And when storm victims approach St. Louis Mayor Cara Spencer about how they’re feeling about the governmental response to the disaster, she says the emotions “run the gamut.”
“There was a recognition that there's still so much left to be done,” Spencer said in an interview Thursday for the Politically Speaking Hour on St. Louis on the Air. “There was disappointment, there's fear, there's heartbreak. The span of emotions that people express is just indescribable. And I think that’s to be expected. We had such an unexpected, massive, massive sense of devastation hit our city. And we are still processing it as a community.”
Since the storm, the city, state and federal governments have allocated hundreds of millions of dollars to help storm victims. That includes funds from the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which provided more than $50 million in individual aid to residents. The city is also devoting interest from the St. Louis Rams settlement to aid recovery efforts, while the state legislature approved $100 million in funding.
But some residents and community organizers have criticized the city’s response, saying that it’s been too slow and that they’ve had to do too much of the work on their own.
Spencer acknowledges that there’s been a lag to actually get money to help recovery efforts. For instance: The city had a large contract in place with a company to remove debris, but that didn’t end up working out. She called the contracting piece "arduous," especially since spending money requires Board of Aldermen approval, backing of the Board of Estimate and Apportionment and the procurement process.
“We have emergency orders in place that have allowed us to fast track a lot of this,” Spencer said. “We have programs to repair people's homes. And when we have contractors going out there to either remove debris or do work to stabilize homes, we want to make sure that those contractors are qualified and can do the work. There's a whole host of things that go into building up these programs that unfortunately have taken quite a bit of time to get going.”
She said the Board of Estimate and Apportionment, which makes major financial decisions for the city, is meeting more regularly to expedite tornado-related expenditures.
“Part of it is really just standing up those programs, making sure that we're not giving money away to folks who were not truly impacted,” Spencer said. “And that's important, because at the end of the day, our funding is finite. And we want to make sure that it goes to the families that need it most.”
A massive challenge
Julian Nicks, chief recovery officer for the city, said that, at this point, there’s been nearly $1.6 billion in assessed damage from the tornado. And some of the complications with repairing all the destruction is that a large percentage of the affected houses in some neighborhoods are uninsured.
Nicks said even homes that have insurance, especially in north St. Louis, are underinsured. That means that the aid available to people “is not enough, and we also know that the amount of dollars that the city has is not enough.”
“What we're focusing on is, how do we help people move into shelter and find a safe place to be for winter,” Nicks said. “For some people, that is putting $50,000 into their home for home repair. That's the amount that we have for our home repair program. For others, it is paying for and supporting rental assistance for them to move into another place.”
The Board of Aldermen on Friday is expected to allocate roughly $13 million to expand shelter capacity – and to provide people with temporary housing. Spencer said the strategy is twofold: First is making sure there’s enough shelter capacity for the historically unhoused population.
“And we are expanding the beds available to include folks that have been impacted by the tornado,” Spencer said. “We're also simultaneously working to ensure that we have a rental assistance program that can put families and vulnerable folks that were impacted by the tornado in apartments when possible to get through the winter.”
Spencer said that one challenge in getting people to some sort of temporary shelter is that some property owners fear that either their belongings or actual pieces of their homes, like bricks and copper wiring, will be stolen.
She said the St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department performed well in the direct aftermath of the tornado by preventing looting.
“By and large, the St. Louis Police Department did an absolutely phenomenal job of doing that,” Spencer said. “And we're going to lean into our partnership there to ensure that we're addressing concerns this winter as well.”
FEMA criticism
The tornado sparked a rare, bipartisan, all-hands-on-deck response from Missouri political leaders. Spencer and Gov. Mike Kehoe worked toward getting President Donald Trump to approve an emergency disaster declaration that unlocked FEMA funds. And U.S. Sen. Eric Schmitt helped the city get more federal support for debris removal.
But both Democratic and Republican lawmakers from Missouri have contended FEMA’s response has been slow – and, at times, inadequate – in helping residents. Spencer said she expected a quicker response from FEMA in the immediate aftermath of the tornado.
Trump eventually signed the declaration about four weeks after the tornado, which was actually somewhat quicker compared to other Missouri disasters.
“I have been frustrated,” said Spencer, emphasizing that individual FEMA officials have been “phenomenal.”
“We have all been frustrated and disappointed with FEMA’s failure to drive the response, providing housing, providing food, and the logistical nightmare that was immediately apparent in the hours, certainly days and weeks following the tornado,” she said.
The tornado hit at a time when Trump was laying off FEMA employees. And Nicks said there were other major issues with the FEMA response: The agency didn’t go door to door to reach people that didn’t go to the city’s disaster recovery center. And he said FEMA left “really, really early, from my point of view around the individual assistance support for residents.”
He also said a number of residents who applied for rental assistance were frustrated with the amount of paperwork needed.
“So we have a lot of people who are left out of that safety net where the rental assistance from FEMA will not be sufficient, and so therefore we have to figure out how we stand in the gap,” Nicks said.
Spencer said that the city will be pushing for Community Development Block Grant Disaster Relief Funds to help residents “fill those gaps.”
“That’s something we will be looking for a congressional allocation,” she said. “We need those funds to be able to develop a full-scale rebuild plan that our city deserves.”
“St. Louis on the Air” brings you the stories of St. Louis and the people who live, work and create in our region. The show is produced by Miya Norfleet, Emily Woodbury, Danny Wicentowski, Elaine Cha and Alex Heuer. Darrious Varner is our production assistant. The audio engineer is Aaron Doerr.
