St. Louis Public Radio published an investigation documenting how decisions at City Hall slowed tornado recovery. The mayor’s response included pointed criticisms of the city’s Community Development Administration, a department I led from September 2022 to November 2025. I feel compelled to set the record straight because the people of St. Louis deserve an accurate accounting of what happened.
Mayor Cara Spencer told STLPR that “the vast majority of funds we had awarded many years before to CDA were still unspent” when she took office, and that CDA was “clearly incapable of getting funds effectively out the door.” Both statements are false.
CDA was charged with administering $189 million in ARPA funds. Before I left, I explained to the Board of Aldermen that less than 25% ($43 million) remained in city accounts. The rest had been spent ($94 million) or advanced to nonprofit partners ($52 million).
The suggestion that our team was “incapable” is especially offensive. Our analysts, planners, accountants, engineers, attorneys and program managers managed the largest allocation of federal funds. CDA’s federal expenditures grew from $24 million in 2022 to $58 million in 2024.
Claims about home repair funds are similarly inaccurate. CDA leveraged a $15 million ARPA appropriation — all committed and more than 80% spent when I left — to repair more than 1,000 homes and roughly triple our home repair program. In 2025 alone, according to figures released by the Spencer administration’s new CDA leadership, CDA’s Home Repair Programs completed work on 499 homes. The Office of Recovery, by the city’s own dashboard, has completed work on 23.
St. Louis was already in a housing crisis before the tornado. Development agencies had spent years expanding home repair and housing production programs while creating rental assistance, downpayment assistance and stabilization programs.
After the tornado, I repeatedly urged the Mayor’s Office to scale existing programs to meet the extraordinary need. Instead, the administration spent months hiring consultants including McKinsey, Ernst & Young, Deployed Resources, Tetra Tech, SLS and Kea Point to build an Office of Recovery that duplicated existing city capacity.
The approach largely failed because the Mayor’s Office was not structured to manage contracts and invoices at that scale.
As a result, efforts to appropriate tornado recovery funds remained stalled at the Board of Aldermen. Programs designed to rebuild North St. Louis existed, but the administration chose not to use them.
The Board of Aldermen should appropriate at least $150 million in Rams settlement funds to defined tornado recovery programs — not to a generic recovery account controlled by the Mayor’s Office, but line by line to departments capable of executing the work.
Two-thirds of the funds should go toward home repair, housing production and neighborhood transformation, with the rest split among rental assistance, downpayment assistance, shelter and other needs. The city also needs to consolidate its fragmented housing and development agencies under a single department.
None of these steps will bring back the year North St. Louis lost, but they can help chart a real path forward. The city has the tools, the funds and the capacity to rebuild. It just needs the will to use them.
Nahuel Fefer is the former director of the St. Louis Community Development Administration.