City’s long-awaited tornado committee dives into short-term winter solutions

Six months after a tornado ripped through St. Louis, the city finally convened a hand-chosen group of community leaders to brainstorm plans to help guide its response. Roughly 30 people from St. Louis’ newly-merged “Tornado Recovery Advisory Committee” met for the first time on Saturday, offering ideas and input under a process designed to look forward, not back.

The stakes are high for the group, which was tasked with coming up with near-term solutions—meaning, doable within 30 to 45 days—for funding gaps, winter outreach, case management, resource hubs, and temporary shelters. Asked why it had taken so long to convene the group in light of the urgency of its mandate, press secretary Rasmus Jorgensen said it was initially meant to convene sooner, but “it was pushed back because we made some adjustments to the scope and brought in support to help us make these meetings as productive as possible.”

Committee members were asked to sort themselves into one of those five groups based on where they thought they could best help. At the top of the day, Mayor Cara Spencer reiterated that a “key priority” for the city was getting prepared to assist tornado survivors with added services as winter approaches.

The city previously created two committees tasked with this work, one made up of “civic leaders” and another made up of community members, but the city merged them last week ahead of Saturday’s meeting. Mayoral spokesman Rasmus Jorgensen said in a text Monday that the committees were merged to “speed up the process and enhance collaboration.”

People present included leaders from 4theVille, the Regional Business Council, St. Louis Community Credit Union, St. Louis Integrated Health Network, along with several staffers from the city and its St. Louis Development Corporation. Along with community members representing the hardest hit neighborhoods, they brainstormed throughout much of Saturday at the Mathews-Dickey Boys & Girls Club even as contractors were applying tar to the roof, prompting a move to a larger room mid-day.

Some solutions floated Saturday included a boost to the number of disaster case managers in the city (said by some on Saturday to currently be 12), a pool of private funding to nimbly cover financial gaps, connecting with the private sector to keep 1,000 active shelter beds available in the region, creating a centralized website for tornado assistance services, and bolstering community resource hubs.

When asked how attainable some of the committee’s ambitious, short-term goals were, the city’s chief recovery officer Julian Nicks seemed confident, saying the ideas could build off the work of his Recovery Office, which handles tornado response for the city with a staff of around eight.

“Everyone came to work,” he said. “I’m excited there was some clear action that came out of the meeting.”

He said next steps for achieving some of those goals could come as soon as next week.

Erica Henderson, whose Key Strategic Group led the meeting on Saturday, said it presented an opportunity for residents and non-governmental advocates to talk ideas directly with the city. 

In their newly formed small groups, members were asked to spend much of the morning defining the problem for each of those five subject areas and then, after lunch, coming up with quick solutions. Many ideas discussed among them mentioned a specific need for stronger case management, and more people assigned to that role. 

Each subgroup eventually presented their recommendations to the entire committee, with plans to meet to discuss findings and implementation at two virtual meetings later this week. 

The group tasked with addressing funding gaps, made up of people from several local charities and businesses, came to the conclusion that it would work to create a process to pool private resources that would be deployed flexibly, based on priorities laid out by the city and other community groups. Some residents have criticized the city, state, and Federal Emergency Management Agency for the pace and relatively small amount of government resources that have gone to people impacted by the tornado. But the funding gap group saw that issue as a “solvable problem” in the near term if given more clarity on where private dollars should go, the consultant working with them said.

The shelter beds group, which Nicks sat in for much of the day, brainstormed how it could leverage potentially empty housing facilities, like vacant dormitories, for immediate winter shelter. They also discussed potential private-sector partnerships with hotels or short-term rental agencies for intermediate housing for people displaced by the tornado. Other topics discussed by other groups included creating a bridge between the local and government response, the need for a much more comprehensive case management system, and a clear, centralized location for where people can access tornado resources.

While much of the discussion was near-term, Nicks said the work the Recovery Office is doing will eventually snowball into more comprehensive change for North St. Louis, if they’re successful at meeting the needs of tornado-impacted residents. He talked about making North City a place where Black young professionals would want to settle.

“You can start to imagine what a comeback would look like that would match the culture, the people that are there, and respect what they want for their neighborhood, but also attract more residents,” he said.