STLPR0%
St. Louis mayor fiercely defends City Hall’s tornado recovery: ‘I'm very proud’ 66%
5/11/2026, 10:00:00 AM
BS Summary: This article contains 38 faulty reasoning types, including Appeal to Authority, Self-Serving Bias, and Negativity Bias, with Ambiguity (Equivocation) as the most egregious example at 13.3% saturation with 759 hits. Analysis detected 7,329 faulty-reasoning hits from 5,701 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 60.6% and a BS Rank of 66% (5,715 of 16,813 articles). This article is worse (more manipulative) than 66.00% of the article peer group.
As the May 16 tornado bore down on the area last year, tornado sirens failed to sound in St.
Louis.
Soon, it became clear that wasn’t the only thing that had gone wrong.
News outlets widely reported the impact of President Donald Trump’s call to eliminate FEMA.
Nearly a year later, debris still covers much of north St.
Louis, where the storm hit hardest, and local recovery efforts have been painfully slow.
Since early January, St.
Louis Public Radio has investigated the slow recovery and found that St.
Louis City Hall also made decisions that have left residents still waiting for help.
STLPR sent Mayor Cara Spencer a list of those findings, and, on Friday, STLPR’s Kate Grumke sat down with Spencer and Chief Recovery and Neighborhood Transformation Officer Julian Nicks at City Hall to hear their response.
This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
Kate Grumke: Mayor, it's been a year since the tornado.
How are you feeling as May 16 approaches?
Cara Spencer: Oh my gosh.
It has been just shy of a year, and the feelings I have going into this anniversary I couldn't put into words, and they're so varied.
They span the gamut.
I still feel so much grief for the loss of so many residents — both physical, mental and, you know, obviously the loss of life.
But I'm also very hopeful.
I'm very proud of the work that our city did.
I'm proud of so many organizations and people.
I have so much hope and also so much grief.
Of course, the work we have ahead of us remains and is immense.
It's about putting one foot in front of the other every day and continuing to make progress.
City’s low repair numbers
Marco Turner clears bricks and debris from a damaged neighborhood in north St.
Louis on May 17, a day after a tornado tore through the area.
Five people were killed in the storm, and thousands of buildings were damaged.
Grumke: We checked your office's website.
And as of this morning, it says you've repaired 23 homes and demolished 69 when thousands need work.
So, Mayor, I'm wondering, how do you justify how low those numbers are?
Spencer: It's been so hard.
The scale of this disaster was truly enormous, and we ended up being this sort of guinea pig on the national stage for this brand-new FEMA — and I shouldn't even say brand-new FEMA — ever-changing FEMA, juggling all that, ramping up existing programs, building new programs has been painstakingly slow.
And understanding where the federal government, where the state was going to be able to come in with those larger pots of money and be able to help us and … it has been enormously slow.
Our city has historically been slow at a lot of things, but we are now in a position where we've been able to shore up many of the city processes that were far too slow to begin with.
We've got the partnerships on the ground working that are ready to accelerate this work for year two, and as we go into weather that will be much more accommodating for doing that work.
Waiting for FEMA
Emergency management specialists James Doll, left, and Kayla West of FEMA assess tornado damage in St.
Louis’ Kingsway East neighborhood on May 21.
Grumke: You've been talking about the federal government from early in the response to the tornado.
A hundred days after the tornado, you came on “St.
Louis on the Air” and said that FEMA wasn't showing up how you hoped.
Looking back, you waited for FEMA for a really long time, almost fruitlessly.
Do you wish you had changed course or pivoted sooner?
Spencer: Well, I wouldn't say it was fruitlessly.
You know, FEMA has provided almost $50 million of individual assistance to our residents.
That's $50 million we wouldn't have had without FEMA.
They've also provided public assistance and through an enormous amount of work.
From our cost recovery and our recovery office as well as our department heads, we have submitted tens of millions of dollars of public assistance, and we have so far had an enormously successful track record in getting those approved, and so we're on track to getting quite a bit of funding from FEMA.
Nowhere near where we hoped, you're right, and certainly in the hours, days following the tornado, the lack of FEMA presence on the ground was both heartbreaking and enormously challenging for our residents and our city to accommodate.
But that being said, there have been some meaningful partnerships and frankly, a city can't do this alone.
And if we had pivoted to try to do this without any assistance at the federal or state level, we would absolutely be worse off today.
And so while we're not anywhere near where we want to be, where we should be and where our residents deserve us to be, I know that we couldn't do this alone, and we're better off even with limited partnership.
Nicks: And I may add, hindsight's 20-20, right?
I think when we were initially requesting the private property debris removal when it got approved in September, but we didn't get the official memo until November and clarification in February.
We had initially, for example, set up a demolition program that we were expecting to be very small.
We were expecting it to be about 50 to 60 homes, to be mostly the condemned buildings that FEMA wouldn't cover, but we expected a lot more of it to be.
The program flipped.
It became a major city-led demolition effort and repair effort.
We thought the city would mostly own repair, and federal government would own the massive share of demolition, and that turned out not to be the case.
And so having to flip those engines took longer to set up and build, and we may have done some things differently, but I think at the end of the day we did predict quite a bit of it and prepare the systems where we can.
But we didn't expect it at this scale.
Grumke: I wanted to ask you about condemned buildings because the public guides that FEMA has for public assistance say that they don't reimburse for demolishing condemned buildings.
And I know that you all were briefed on that in June by the State Emergency Management Agency … but you all continued to ask about condemned buildings for months after that, after June, including in that letter in December.
Why did you all think that they might make an exception or change their rules when you knew for so long that they typically don't?
Spencer: You're right, FEMA does have guidance that they don't typically — often — include demolition of condemned buildings.
However, this was not a typical disaster.
And when you look at the size and scale of this disaster, it is absolutely beyond normal scale.
And we also know very clearly that FEMA has and often does provide those supports or additional supports for cities and for disasters for an undue burden.
And we absolutely believe that because of the volume of buildings that were hit in the city of St.
Louis that were previously condemned, this was an unprecedented burden.
So our guidance from our relationships with FEMA and as well as the many, many disaster experts that we had embedded in our team at the time was that historically FEMA would and should have approved the cost of demolition of those buildings.
To fail to go for after that funding would have been a huge missed opportunity for the City of St.
Louis.
Now under this new FEMA, they did not end up approving those and provide that path for us.
And you're right, that is enormously frustrating.
But it is my firm belief to this day still that we should have received that and that in other iterations of FEMA, we would have received those funds.
Grumke: But in June, you saw that in the text, and you didn't end up demolishing those condemned buildings until March.
Workers begin demolishing a tornado-damaged home in St.
Louis' Academy/Sherman Park neighborhood on March 20.
Spencer: We were still going for those funds.
We should have, frankly, and I do believe, under other circumstances and under other leadership of FEMA, we would have received that.
Grumke: Is there an example of another city that you heard did get condemned buildings?
Nicks: I guess to add into here, Kate, one, I kind of want to say two things.
We didn't wait to start taking down buildings until we had FEMA approval.
We started taking down buildings immediately after the tornado, and our broader process with the funds we had.
The challenge was that it was slower, it was a slower process, and it was a massive amount of funds.
So when we look, and we didn't have those exact numbers at the time, but we knew the lion's share of vacant buildings in the tornado zone, the majority of those that were red-tagged were previously condemned.
Now we have official results that say that about 30% of the total buildings that likely need demolition were condemned.
That's about 250 buildings.
Just to do demolition, if that wasn't supported by the state or supported by FEMA, would have been a massive drain on resources that couldn't be used for repair, couldn't be used for rental assistance, couldn't be used for those things.
And so when we were making the trade-off of putting condemned buildings in there, we knew it was a long shot, but we also know that the guidelines you were referring to are [Public Assistance Program and Policy Guide] guidelines.
Those are guidelines.
The Stafford Act gives a lot of discretion to FEMA administrators to be able to choose and justify that when it's in the best interest and really necessary for the recovery of a city to be able to grant that.
Do we think it would come?
No, but for all of our residents, we knew that this is a massive disaster and we had to advocate at every level for as much as we could.
Spencer: Well, we did think that.
I mean, I did think we would get those funds.
I mean, we had dozens and dozens of conversations with national experts.
And the reality of your question is: Why didn't we deploy the limited resources we have at some of those condemned buildings, recognizing, as Julian pointed out, that it was very possible that we weren't going to get that funding?
But from my perspective, those buildings, those condemned buildings had been vacant and condemned for decades.
Grumke: We heard from residents who are neighbors to those buildings that say that they can't get started on work because they're worried that those buildings are going to come down on their home.
Spencer: You’re right.
So what we've done right now is we started, as Julian pointed out, on those emergency cases where they are next to buildings, where they're occupied, but to deploy the very limited resources that we had on buildings that had been vacant for decades and we possibly had a path to paying for them so we could do more demolitions in the long run could have been extremely wasteful.
And so where we were, we wanted to make sure that we were deploying the limited resources that we had in the way that was going to allow us to do the most good in the long run.
But you're right, there are many instances where you have a building, whether it was condemned before the tornado or not, which is immediately adjacent to an occupied building or one that would be occupied if the resident or homeowner could invest in it safely, by taking the building down.
And those are precisely the buildings that we're prioritizing taking down in this wave here.
Turning down a meeting with an Army Corps leader
Cahokia Heights Mayor Curtis McCall Sr. speaks to the Mississippi River Commission, including the board's president, Maj.
Gen.
Kimberly A.
Peeples of the Army Corps of Engineers, at center, during a public meeting aboard the MV Mississippi along the St.
Louis riverfront on Aug. 15, as part of the commission’s annual low-water inspection trip.
St.
Louis Mayor Cara Spencer did not attend.
Grumke: I want to talk about that early request to have the Army Corps do the debris removal.
In August, we've learned that state Rep.
Colin Wellenkamp set up a special meeting for you to plead your case to have the Army Corps do that work.
It was a meeting with Maj.
Gen.
Kimberly Peeples, who oversees the Mississippi Valley Division of the Army Corps.
And we've learned that you didn't take that meeting.
Why didn't you?
Spencer: Well, Kate, I think that's a mischaracterization of that meeting.
I had absolutely dozens of meetings with the Army Corps of Engineers over the course of the last year.
Many here in this office, with their leadership.
They were embedded in some of our decision-making, but that meeting was more about rivers in general, and I'd be happy to share with you the details of that proposed meeting.
And, in fact, I think my focus was primarily on the tornado at that time, and so not taking that meeting was, even in retrospect, I believe the right thing to do.
I've talked to Rep.
Wellenkamp, and he's been a great partner.
You know, he is one of the representatives who have been on the ground meeting with community, not just talking about community, but really seeing what's been going on here, and I believe he shared with you the purpose of that meeting.
And I don't believe that it was characterized in your words here in the way that he would characterize the meeting.
Editor’s note: Missouri state Rep.
Colin Wellenkamp confirmed to STLPR that tornado recovery was expected to be part of the discussion between Spencer and Maj.
Gen.
Peeples that day.
STLPR also reviewed the meeting invite, which had “St.
Louis City priorities” on the agenda.
In an email after this interview, mayoral Press Secretary Rasmus Jorgensen acknowledged the administration spoke to Wellenkamp as recently as a few weeks ago about this meeting and, to STLPR, said that it would not have “moved the needle on securing the president and FEMA’s approval for an Army Corps mission.”
Grumke: That's what I believe it to be, and it was on Aug.
15.
On Aug.
14, I had reported that you were asking for the Army Corps to do this work and they were here in St.
Louis.
Maj.
Gen.
Peeples is a really top dog in the Army Corps — so you said you were talking to people in the Army Corps — did you talk with Maj.
Gen.
Peeples?
Spencer: Absolutely, we had, I can't speak to that specific, you know.
Grumke: You met with Maj.
Gen.
Peeples?
Maj.
Gen.
Kimberly A.
Peeples, commander of the Mississippi Valley Division of the Army Corps of Engineers, speaks during a public meeting aboard the MV Mississippi along the St.
Louis riverfront on Aug. 15 as part of the Mississippi River Commission’s annual low-water inspection trip.
Spencer: I'm not going to, I'm unable to speak on that specifically right now, but I can tell you that over the course of the last year, we had dozens of meetings, and we were really working with a whole host of leadership within the Army Corps.
You know, your question about leaning on them is an important one because the scale of debris removal and demolition was so immense.
We knew that it far exceeded what our city had capacity to really hold, and certainly the expertise to be able to move forward.
And so when you look at disasters like the tornado that hit Joplin, the Army Corps came in immediately and led that effort.
And we knew and still know that the Army Corps has the capacity and the expertise to really run a program the size of what we needed here.
Grumke: I was shocked to see in the letter where you're asking them to help that you said the timeline could have been that they would be finished by March, and we're sitting here in May with very little of that work done.
So I'm wondering why you would pass up any opportunity to meet with them to plead your case for them to do that work.
Spencer: Again, that meeting was set up for a very different purpose, and I'm happy to share with you the purpose of that, and you know, I would encourage you to talk to the representative who put that meeting together because it was set for a very different purpose than what you're describing.
But that being said, I mean, you know as I mentioned, we just had dozens and dozens of meetings with the Army Corps, their leadership; SEMA, the state emergency management team; FEMA, a whole host of partners.
I mean, it really was just an enormous number of conversations, pleadings for the Army Corps to get engaged at that level.
Grumke: And we've heard of some other times where people offered to meet with you, to speak with you and you didn't take it in the early days.
One that was notable, a former FEMA administrator, Pete Gaynor, who was administrator under Trump's first term, emailed you his cellphone in June and offered to help.
And he said you never called him.
So why did you not talk to him?
Then-FEMA Director Pete Gaynor gives President Donald Trump an update on Hurricane Laura at the Oval Office in August 2020.
Spencer: I'm not able to talk to my, speak to specific, I can't speak to that specifically.
I mean, gosh, during the initial days of the tornado, you may know this, my email changed when I became mayor, and of course, I have staff that help deal with the absolute barrage of emails that any city mayor gets on a regular basis, and so I often don't, I'm not the recipient of all those, so I couldn't speak to specifics, but certainly we were meeting, I was meeting around the clock.
I think there were weeks I didn't sleep at all, just working consistently around the clock, and there are people and individuals sometimes that we weren't able to take meetings with, but we certainly did try to take everyone that we could.
That one in particular, you know, I couldn't speak to that specific email that may or may not come through my right email or not.
I just can't speak to it.
Grumke: You did actually respond.
You said that you would call him, and then you didn't, so I know that you did receive the email.
Leaning on consultants for disaster expertise
Mayor Cara Spencer points at floor plans for the upper level of a Peter & Paul Community Services shelter building under construction on May 28 in St.
Louis.
Grumke: Can you tell us who was giving you advice?
Who were the experts that you had telling you how to navigate this wild and, for the first time, you've been through a disaster?
Spencer: Oh gosh, you know, we called on so many folks.
Initially, you may know that any city, as FEMA is really shifting the burden of responding to major disasters onto cities, our city wasn't equipped with staff.
You saw from the report about CEMA following the issue with the sirens that there was a cascade of failures within the city's emergency management team.
And that was really unfortunate.
So we brought in immediately some folks from Deployed Resources, which is a national disaster response firm.
We brought in some experts from McKinsey and other consultant agencies who have a large amount of experience with disasters nationwide, and just a host of folks.
We brought in consultants from Tetra Tech.
We now have SLS and other consultancies, but we also had the State of Missouri's SEMA.
The state in Missouri has more disasters than I think any state in the United States right now under FEMA.
We, unfortunately as a state, have a vast array of experience in disasters, and we had those folks embedded in our EOC for the first essentially two months following the May 16 tornado.
Setting up new repair programs instead of using existing ones
A man walks into a disaster recovery center tent at Sumner High School on June 25 in north St.
Louis.
Grumke: And since Julian's here I think it'd be good to talk a little bit about the recovery office.
So we've been reporting on that office’s recovery, and we now know that Julian, your team stood up a bunch of new programs like home repair and demolition, but we obtained emails that show in June the then-Director of the Community Development Agency Nahuel Fefer wrote you a really detailed memo laying out the existing city programs that could immediately be reworked to do those exact same things, home repair and demolition.
So I want to know why you decided to spend months creating entirely new programs instead of adapting what the city already had?
Spencer: For one thing, CDA was operating at a massively expanded capacity following ARPA, and that was enormously slow.
When I came in, one of the first things before the tornado that I really focused on was the ARPA funds and how the city was woefully behind every other city in the nation in deploying those ARPA funds and getting them spent.
And there was, of course, a timeline.
And the overwhelming majority of those unspent funds were in CDA.
In fact, the vast majority of funds we had awarded many years before to CDA were still unspent when I walked in the door.
And so, you know, the idea of putting more funds into a department that was clearly incapable of getting funds effectively out the door was something I was very, very skeptical of.
Nonetheless, and as well, I'll say as well, the home repair program that the city had in place was one I have a lot of experience with as an alderperson.
It was first in the building division, shifted over to CDA.
And it was painfully slow to get out the door.
Residents have been complaining for many, many, many years about the slowness of that program.
And that program was set up really to do minor home repairs between $10 and $20,000.
You know, often a little bit of tuck-pointing, some roof repair and maybe some front step work or stuff like that.
Very, very different work than what we needed to see following the tornado, rebuilding roofs and major structural work.
That being said, recognizing we did have a home repair program in place, we did allocate some funds to CDA.
And unfortunately, those funds didn't get out the door very quickly. and so we did have to pivot.
We recognized not only was the work fundamentally different in its scope by being very very structural and much bigger, and we wanted to get it out the door much more quickly than Mr.
Fefer was able to get those funds out the doors.
Grumke: Yeah, and I take your point that there are valid criticisms of that CDA Home Repair program, but at the end of the day, the proof is in the numbers.
Their most recent year, they had repaired 500 homes.
Julian, you're sitting at a year, 23 homes.
That's a huge difference.
So does that look like it was more successful than adapting that existing program?
Spencer: Look, right now, as I mentioned, when Mr.
Fefer left CDA, we were still sitting on over half of the ARPA funds in that department.
And there was just not a feasible way to scale that in a way that there was a level of confidence.
We did, at the end of the day, award funds.
We did provide funds to that program, and they're still not deployed.
And so at the end of the day, we really felt like we had to bring in partners to scale that program to make it much more quickly.
Grumke: So is this just a failure of government not being capable of helping people in the way that it needs to?
Spencer: Look, we're a year in, and while this has taken an enormous amount of time to get set up and understand where our federal and local partners are able to come in, we are now very well positioned to accelerate that work, and we're seeing that as we speak.
Grumke: What's your plan for that?
When do you think it is going to scale, and to what extent?
Nicks: So it is starting now.
So we're already starting to see our permit processes moving through a lot faster as we've been working with the building division to iron that out.
I'd say there's a lot of parts of the repair program and the private property system program that are not just repair.
We've seen us increase to doing about 83 wraps of secure roofs that we've done since the program set up.
We've done over 70 to 80 trees in these areas.
We have done over 230 debris removal operations off of those.
So the program was not just the repair, but it's all the other things that go around the house as well.
And now as we are building up the repair it's been learning about our contractors and our contractor capacity and the needs that they have.
And so I can't say how fast everything will scale because we're learning what our contractor can do.
We're learning the process.
But what I can say is every single week we're seeing better results with faster processing speed.
And that's what we're going to continue to focus on.
Setting up the recovery office with consultants
Mayor Cara Spencer, right, and Julian Nicks, the city’s chief recovery and neighborhood transformation officer, arrive for a press conference to announce the city’s Private Property Assistance Program at the Urban League of Metropolitan St.
Louis Women’s Business Center on Oct. 21 in St.
Louis’ Penrose neighborhood.
Grumke: I want to ask, too, about the structure of the recovery office.
We know that McKinsey came and donated time to help set up that office.
We saw that memo.
I spoke with officials from St.
Louis County, Brentwood, Richmond Heights, Clayton and St.
Louis Public Libraries, and all of them said they had previous experience with disaster recovery and FEMA.
And it doesn't seem like that same experience was present in the recovery in St.
Louis.
So I want to understand why you created a new recovery team made up of people who hadn't worked on disaster response before.
Spencer: We brought in a lot of experts throughout, as I mentioned, some of those partners across the consultants that we've brought in to help us really bring in that expertise, which you're right, we needed.
And I think the proof is in the numbers, so to speak, and the cost recovery.
As I mentioned the tens of millions of dollars that we have submitted, we have a 98% approval rating on those, and that really speaks to the work that we're doing on that regard.
You know, when I took office, I would say that there was a lot to be desired in a lot of city government and our emergency management team had enormous challenges.
And there was experience there.
Unfortunately, it was experience that didn't pan out.
And as we saw from the report I mentioned earlier, had some serious holes in it.
We've worked to bring in some new leadership to that organization, and we're looking to expand the capabilities of that.
But I firmly believe, as I have been advocating at East-West Gateway, that emergency management should not be siloed into cities.
We need a federal government that can and should be the response to disasters this size.
And those jurisdictions that you mentioned, Kate, are significantly smaller than us, and the damages that they had following the tornado dwarf.
In fact, if you add them all together, it's one-tenth of the damage that the city of St.
Louis has.
Grumke: And with such a simpler situation that they're dealing with and in such a smaller city, isn't it even more important for you all to have experience?
Spencer: That's why we brought on so many experienced individuals, as I mentioned, Tetra Tech, SLS, our ...
Grumke: How early did those consultants come in?
I know [with] Tetra Tech, the contract was signed in September.
Spencer: Well, we brought in Deployed Resources, I think it was Sunday, the Sunday after the tornado.
So 48 hours later, we had folks with vast disaster experience embedded within our organization.
We also brought in, as I mentioned, we had the state SEMA folks here on the ground embedded, I mean dozens of folks.
So to say we didn't have that experience within our organization is really missing the fundamental structure of disaster response in the weeks, hours, days, months following May 16.
Grumke: So you had it; it was within the consultants.
Spencer: As I mentioned, we also had state SEMA, and they lent an enormous amount of expertise to the City of St.
Louis for months who were embedded in our organization.
Recognizing that not only did the city need that help but no city was set up.
Typically, historically, FEMA as I've mentioned has come in and run that response in the hours days following the tornado, and that did not happen here.
Being a 'squeaky wheel' with FEMA
FEMA workers Wilmary Medina, left, and Elaine Braswell canvass along Cabanne Avenue and North Drive after torrential flooding on Aug. 10, 2022, in University City.
Grumke: And I mentioned the former FEMA administrator that I spoke with, Pete Gaynor.
He told me that cities, and especially mayors, have to be the “squeaky wheel” when it comes to FEMA.
I want to hear from you what that looked like on your end.
Were you pushing and calling all the time to try to get those answers?
Spencer: Oh, absolutely.
As I mentioned, the state of Missouri is a state that has seen more disasters than almost any other state, certainly in the last couple of years.
And my first call from the EOC was to Gov.
Mike Kehoe, who was on the ground by 9 a.m. the next morning, physically here with us, and partnering to make sure that we had those enormous numbers of state SEMA staff with that enormous, vast decades' worth of disaster experience on the ground with us, helping us to drive what the EOC looked like, what our emergency team looked like and what our response looked like.
But we've also partnered with our federal delegation, both Sen.
Schmitt and Josh Hawley, who are also on the ground with us.
And we know that it's those partnerships that are going to be most effective in getting the Community Development Block Grant, disaster relief funds.
They were instrumental in getting the FEMA declaration to begin with.
And so those partnerships, those conversations, that pleading, if you will, was absolutely necessary to getting where we are.
Preventing the May 16 tornado from becoming the next Mill Creek
Demolition of the former Frank C.
Baker Storage and Moving Co. building, center, progresses on Jan. 8, 1960, at Leffingwell and Chestnut streets in St.
Louis’ Mill Creek Valley.
A J.S.
Alberici Construction Co. crane is visible at right, and St.
Paul’s AME Church stands at left.
Grumke: One resident told us she's worried the May 16 tornado is going to be the next Mill Creek or Pruitt-Igoe, where a majority Black community is just wiped off of St.
Louis' map.
What are you going to do to make sure that doesn't happen?
Spencer: St.
Louis has such a long history of neglecting Black residents and the conditions of the neighborhoods that were impacted by the May 16 tornado are very obvious reminders of our city's legacy of neglecting many communities.
First and foremost, centering our work in retaining as many residents as we can.
I think that's why standing up programs like rental assistance and making sure that we are deploying the home repair funds.
Making sure that in not only the funds that we've allocated so far, which have been close to $50 million of local city funds deploying, and advocating for and deploying the $100 million from the state.
But in the package that we're working with the Board of Aldermen to allocate over $100 million of Rams settlement funds, specifically into north St.
Louis to not only support rebuilding homes, but to implement the plans that neighbors are building with PDA and our city partners to drive what our communities should look like.
We know that we don't have enough funds, even with the Rams and everything, to make people whole and to make our communities, communities that have experienced decades of disinvestment, whole.
But I do want it to be part of my legacy as mayor to do what we can to both repair those decades of disinvestment and to rebuild in a way that not only keeps our residents here, but welcomes back many who have chosen to leave.
Grumke: We've heard from residents who say they've lost hope in the city ever showing up for them.
What do you say to that?
Spencer: We're going to keep showing up, and it's about putting one foot in front of the other, and while we recognize that this recovery has been slower than we've wanted and certainly than our residents have wanted, we're going to continue to show up, and we're continue to invest, and we’re going to continue to partner with community to build back that hope.
STLPR’s Hiba Ahmad produced this interview with sound engineering from Jonathan Ahl.
Analysis
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