St. Louis’ emergency management agency is still cash-strapped, understaffed months after the tornado 78%
By Hiba Ahmad0% Kavahn Mansouri63%
3/19/2026, 10:00:00 AM
BS Summary: This article contains 20 faulty reasoning types, including Appeal to Emotion, Framing Effect, and Availability Heuristic, with Biased Writer Voice as the most egregious example at 8% saturation with 167 hits. Analysis detected 1,125 faulty-reasoning hits from 2,084 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 70.5% and a BS Rank of 78% (3,768 of 16,813 articles). This article is worse (more manipulative) than 77.60% of the article peer group.
St.
Louis’ City Emergency Management Agency is without proper funding and staff and is operating with an emergency operations plan that hasn’t been updated in more than 20 years as the region enters into what has recently been the busiest months for tornadoes.
The agency has largely remained unchanged in the 10 months since a tornado cut a swath of destruction through north St.
Louis.
But on Wednesday, the Board of Estimate and Apportionment approved the transfer of some positions within the Department of Public Safety, which CEMA is housed under, to provide the struggling agency with one more staffer.
The agency will now have seven funded positions, three of which are currently filled, which includes Commissioner Gregg Favre’s role.
In an interview with St.
Louis Public Radio in January, he said that it should have a staff of 15 for a city the size of St.
Louis but would settle for 11 or 12 positions.
“CEMA has been underfunded and understaffed since its inception, and that's been true for every commissioner, myself included,” Favre said.
A struggling agency
The agency’s lack of funds and staffing has been apparent to city leadership for years, but its commissioners had repeatedly failed to secure additional resources despite making multiple pitches for more money.
STLPR reviewed hours of Board of Aldermen budget hearings, federal grant applications and CEMA budgets from the past six years and found an agency hamstrung in its ability to respond effectively to emergencies and disasters.
Mayor Cara Spencer appointed Favre to the role at the start of this year.
“CEMA should have been growing for the last 20 years, at least, if not 30 years,” Favre said in January.
“These are positions that are national best practice everywhere you go, and we've just not elected as a city to put time and effort into this.”
The agency is responsible for coordinating emergency response in the wake of extreme weather events and natural disasters and also works with city and regional partners to prepare and plan for major events.
For example, CEMA played a critical role in the response to the 2022 floods and helped lead the city’s COVID-19 response in 2020.
It is also in charge of maintaining and updating a copy of the city’s Emergency Operations Plan, an essential document that outlines formalized workflows and chains of command in case of a disaster or major event.
STLPR reporting seems to confirm an allegation that St.
Louis’ plan was last updated in 2003.
Spencer fired Favre’s predecessor, Sarah Russell, last August because the tornado sirens failed to sound during the May tornado.
Russell had worked for the agency since it was formed in 2010 and took the role of commissioner in 2021.
An external review of the agency conducted by law firm Carmody MacDonald after the tornado found “cascading failures” under Russell’s leadership.
The report said that the agency had long been underfunded and failed to maintain an up-to-date version of the city’s Emergency Operations Plan.
Russell has pushed back on some of the claims in the report and has defended the agency’s work, despite the tight budget and staffing it was operating under.
“I made the ask for additional support, both in funding and staff, at every opportunity I had,” Russell said in an interview with STLPR in January.
Russell’s last request was only 10 days before the May 16 storm struck.
But the agency had been requesting nearly double the budget from 2023 to 2026.
“Can a staff of four people in an emergency management agency for a large metropolitan city have a city positioned to respond to a major EF3 tornado?
It's very difficult,” Russell said.
“If you have people that are supporting you that have an understanding of the processes and resources in place that helps.”
While the agency did get more money each year, the amount made up a paltry percentage of the full public safety budget, which includes the St.
Louis Metropolitan Police Department.
For example, CEMA requested $969,274 for fiscal 2025.
The agency received $451,484, which is about 47% of the requested amount.
The total budget of the Department of Public Safety was more than $400 million.
Russell’s 2026 request was for the department’s budget to be raised to 1% of the public safety budget.
That would have allowed CEMA to budget seven staffers, which Russell repeatedly applied for.
However, the agency would routinely fail to spend down its total budget.
In 2023, the agency was allotted $359,979 but left $115,000 unspent.
Other fiscal years showed a difference of roughly $50,000.
When asked to explain the discrepancies, Russell said that it was often because the agency was too busy responding to natural disasters or another emergency to spend all the money.
They added that some of the funding was designated for specific purposes and couldn’t be spent on other uses.
Spencer sat on the budget committees where Russell made their pitches for more robust funding.
In 2024, Spencer asked Russell to return during one such budget hearing with information about how the City Emergency Management Agency measured up to other cities’ agencies.
Baltimore and Memphis had 18 to 19 budgeted positions, Russell reported.
Both cities have nearly double the resident populations compared to St.
Louis.
Both years, Spencer pushed for the city to give more money to the agency at the committee hearings.
“Our emergency management system is staffed significantly lower than some of our peer cities, as far as a per capita base,” Spencer said during a budget meeting in 2024.
“We do rely on our emergency management system in emergencies.
We don't think about you often — sorry for that, that's probably a good thing — but you are there, of course, when an emergency hits.
And so we should be thinking about you year-round.”
Spencer echoed a similar sentiment to her comments from 2024 on Monday when STLPR asked why the agency’s funding hadn’t increased, saying it is less visible because it’s only tapped during emergencies.
That can make it harder for the commissioner to make a case for increased funding, she said.
Having CEMA more involved in how the city responds to weather emergencies year-round will help support the agency and its funding, Spencer said.
She pointed to Favre’s contribution to the city’s new Code Blue protocols, which went into effect this winter when the temperature dropped below a certain threshold and opened up shelter for unhoused St.
Louisans.
He also led planning calls for this winter’s snowstorms and, most recently, the tornado warning last weekend.
“We're safeguarding ourselves in some ways by really elevating CEMA’s role in our day-to-day operations where it should be,” Spencer said in an interview on Monday.
Russell pushed back against the mayor’s suggestion that CEMA wasn’t visible enough in the past.
“CEMA has always been year-round.
We were often leading those [planning] calls.
That's what emergency management is,” Russell said.
“We did it during [the May 16] tornado — we did everything to keep the response moving forward."
Federal funding falters
CEMA’s budget requests began to grow in 2023 in part because federal funding was starting to drop off, Russell said.
STLPR reviewed the agency’s Emergency Management Planning Grant applications administered by the Federal Emergency Management Agency from 2021 to 2025.
This funding helped CEMA cover salaries.
The city is expected to match the federal contribution from the grant.
Russell began to ring the alarm about the decrease in federal funds to the Board of Aldermen in 2023 and warned that the city would have to start allocating more local dollars to maintain staffing.
“We were in a multiyear process of tapering down,” Russell told STLPR.
“[FEMA] wasn’t going to cut it off right away.”
These grants are considered a “lifeblood” for many emergency management agencies across the U.S., according to Josh Morton, president of the International Association of Emergency Managers.
The organization is a nonprofit that advocates for FEMA changes that would make it easier for cities and states to access federal relief for disaster recovery.
“FEMA provides millions and millions of dollars in federal grant money that makes Emergency Management possible in communities across this nation,” said Stephen Hawkins, government affairs chair for IAEM.
“Without the federal government grant funding that we have had for decades, emergency management would look very different across the nation, and you have communities that, without federal grant funding, would not have emergency management.”
Hawkins and Morton serve as emergency managers in their respective hometowns, in Macon-Bibb County, Georgia, and Saluda County, South Carolina.
Both said that they have noticed a decline in EMPG funding from FEMA since President Donald Trump took office in 2025 and demanded the agency be overhauled.
“I think to say that it is pretty much a different organization is not an understatement at this point,” Morton said.
Looking ahead to budget season
City agencies, including CEMA, are preparing to bring their budget proposals to the Board of Aldermen this spring.
The agency hasn’t had a chance to make a pitch for increased funding since the May 16 tornado.
Spencer said that she supports Favre’s goal of increasing funding and staffing for CEMA, but said it will take time for the agency to have all of the resources it needs.
“Overhauling a department is something that really takes time,” Spencer said.
“We're going into a really tough budget cycle here for cities across the United States, and in particular with St.
Louis.”
She said that city departments may face an uphill battle this year as the 2021 American Rescue Plan Act runs out.
Another complicating factor is the contentious negotiations with the police department, which has asked for $250 million for fiscal 2027 — a move that Spencer said could be "catastrophic to the rest of the city departments.”
If an increased budget for CEMA isn’t approved by the Board of Aldermen and the St.
Louis Board of Estimate and Apportionment, it would hamper the agency’s ability to develop a new version of the city’s emergency operations plan.
One of the damning assertions from the Carmody report stated that CEMA hadn’t updated the Emergency Operations Plan since 2003, which Favre also said earlier this year.
"Overhauling a department is something that really takes time."
St.
Louis Mayor Cara Spencer
Spencer and Favre confirmed this week that the city is still relying on the 2003 version of the plan, which is so outdated that it doesn’t include revised policies around new technology — including smartphones.
“A full EOP rewrite that meets FEMA … standards requires dedicated planning staff that we do not yet have,” Favre said in a statement on Wednesday.
He said the city agency is currently hiring for two emergency management specialist positions.
Russell disputed the report’s findings about the Emergency Operations Plan and told STLPR that the plan had been restructured into an Emergency Response Framework and was available on the city’s Google Drive.
Russell said at least three staff members alongside members of the fire and police departments were often working to update the plan at least every two years to stay in compliance with federal requirements for grant funding.
CEMA’s federal grant applications that asked whether the plan had been updated were always checked yes.
However, STLPR was not able to find and review the updated version of the plan.
STLPR requested copies of the plan from the city and the Missouri State Emergency Management Agency in mid-February.
The state agency provided a 2004 copy of the plan that contained no changes from the previous year.
Despite having multiple weeks to return the requested records, the city failed to produce a copy of the plan or provide a reason it could not.
While St.
Louis does not post the plan publicly, St.
Louis County has a basic version of its document available on the county website.
Favre told STLPR in January that changing the city agency could take up to two years, but he hopes that strengthening city officials’ understanding of emergency preparedness work may bring additional funding.
“I would certainly offer to anybody on the Board of Aldermen or anybody in a leadership capacity who wants to learn more about our mission, who wants to see what it means to have a fully functioning, fully capable Emergency Management Agency, and how that protects their constituents,” Favre said.
“I'd welcome them to come out and have that conversation.”
STLPR's Kate Grumke and Rachel Lippmann contributed to this story.
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