Colonels aim to bring military efficiency to a place long without it: City Hall

Since St. Louis Mayor Cara Spencer took office in April, she’s doubled down on hiring military veterans for key roles at City Hall, bringing in not one but two Air Force colonels to head city operations. 

The first, and most high-profile, of those hires was Colonel Ben Jonsson, who came to municipal government in May after 25 years in the Air Force. In the past seven months he’s sought to bring a level of rigor to city operations where that kind of discipline hasn’t exactly been the norm. 

Jonsson, 48, has flown massive transport planes and logged more than 900 hours of combat missions. In diplomatic roles, he once simultaneously impressed the leaders of the Air Force in both the U.S. and the nation of Jordan by greeting the latter in one of the three dialects of Arabic in which Jonsson is fluent. Last year, Jonsson was the chief of staff of Air Mobility Command at Scott Air Force Base and had been in line to be made a brigadier general. 

But the promotion was held up by Senator Eric Schmitt (R-Missouri) as part of his larger war on wokeness in the military. Jonsson had a few years prior published an essay encouraging his fellow white officers to talk openly about institutional racism in the Air Force. Military News reported that Schmitt’s actions jeopardized any chance of a promotion. Jonsson left the armed forces in March of this year. 

He’d planned to go into the private defense sector when Spencer instead pitched him on the City Hall job. “It was daunting,” he recalls. “It was massively daunting and she was brutally honest about what we were up against.”

He doesn’t want to go into specifics about what exactly Spencer said. The details, he said, were not flattering to the city.

Ultimately, it was Bryan Barroqueiro, also a colonel at Scott Air Force Base, who talked Jonsson into the job. Barroqueiro was a longtime booster of the city, who loved living downtown so much that he bore the 35-minute commute to the base.

While Spencer hired Jonsson because she wanted him to bring “discipline and structure” to City Hall, the colonel has not had everyone doing pushups at sunrise in front of 1200 Market. He says that Spencer’s marching orders were just as much about bringing organization to the way the city was carrying out its business. For instance, city operations are now coordinated through a project management system called Asana. The specific software matters less than the fact that previously there was no system at all. “It was astonishing to us,” said Jonsson. Everything was done ad hoc via text, email, or phone call.  

(In defense of the previous administration, former Mayor Tishaura Jones has talked about when she came in, there was a reliance on typewriters and literal carbon copies of documents.)

Jonsson’s other overriding mandate was to help employ data analytics to give the administration a stronger sense of the scope of any given problem as well as, more importantly, how well they are fixing it. There’s now a dashboard that tracks how long it takes to hire someone to come work in city government, another dashboard showing the time between a water main breaking and its repair, yet another for when a tree gets reported as a potential hazard and when Forestry trims it or chops it down. They recently reduced hiring time from months to 45 days. The goal for the problem trees is now 30 days. 

Jonsson was also the one to quarterback the city’s revamping of trash pick-up as well as overhauling its response to clearing streets after a storm. A big part of improving the city’s response to snow, Jonsson says, has been coordinating better between all the city departments that are involved in that response—which includes everything from plowing streets to getting homeless people somewhere warm. In November, all those departments were conducting a “tabletop exercise” of what the new, coordinated response would look like when actual white stuff started falling and the exercise went “real world.” The city’s response was generally considered to be much improved compared to its response to a blizzard last January.

About six months after hiring Jonsson, Spencer hired Barroqueiro, the man who had talked Jonsson into his current job. Barroqueiro is now the deputy chief of operations. He’d initially fallen in love with the city 15 years ago, then lived a somewhat itinerant existence in line with many military careers: everywhere from Africa to Tampa. The last three years of his Air Force career were at Scott. Asked what he loved about St. Louis, he said: “The ability to come home from a long day working across the river and go to walk to a baseball game, walk to a hockey game. The city punches above its weight in a lot of categories. That’s why we came.”

Jonsson notes that one of the first things he learned at City Hall was just how low paid even some senior people were—people who could be making a lot more elsewhere. “They want to be a part of something special, to give back to their community, and make it better for succeeding generations,” he says. “It’s inspiring.”

The two colonels are not Spencer’s only military hires. Her new head of the City Emergency Management Agency is Gregg Favre, a former U.S. Navy officer. The new Streets Department director, James Jackson, while not a career military man, was an officer in the Marines. 

All this begs the question, though, of how well military work overlaps with the work of city government.  

The answer, say Jonsson and Barroqueiro, is more than you think. At Scott, both men had been part of a team leading massive operations on the other side of the world, including the U.S. response to the October 7 attack on Israel in 2023 and removing thousands of forces from Niger after a military coup there. Jonsson describes his work as boiling down to empowering the “echelon of leaders” on the ground “to do the things that only they can do.” But instead of military forces in Africa or the Middle East, the echelon of leaders they’re now organizing are personnel in the Department of Human Services, taking care of the homeless, or in the Streets Department, pre-treating and plowing the streets.   

Asked about the most surprising differences between his previous career and St. Louis city government, Jonsson replied, “Without getting into too many specifics, the number of times that I have heard some inference to someone going to jail or being indicted for something—that’s like, whoa. I didn’t expect that.”

He adds, “It’s usually relevant history to why things are the way they are.” In other words: Because so and so went to jail in the 1970s, we do things this way now. 

Jonsson is not without his skeptics, though they are not skeptical of Jonsson personally. One longtime City Hall insider notes that colonels are managers of managers, but at City Hall, if you want something done, you don’t call another manager, you call the person who’s actually going to do the thing you want done: “There are people in City Hall who actually get the things done—and that’s the person you call. The dumpster gets picked up. The pot hole gets filled. The speed bump gets installed.”

Also, there’s this truism about military culture versus the culture of municipal government: “Colonels generally expect from their experience that, if they issue an order, somebody’s going to do it. And you know, that isn’t always the case.”

Asked about this, Jonsson agreed that in the military, “There is an expectation that you give an order, the order is executed.” He said that’s exactly the expectation Spencer is trying to bring to city government. 

The other skepticism that’s been passed around City Hall about the mayor’s colonels again says less about Jonsson and Barroqueiro and more about what they’re up against. 

Overheard not too long ago by someone well acquainted with the inner workings of 1200 Market Street: “It’s only a matter of time before he realizes how overqualified he is and how fucked up this building is.” 

After leaving the Air Force, Jonsson and his family moved from base housing to a neighborhood close to Scott so his daughter could stay at the same high school. She’s a senior now, and after she finishes, Jonsson says the plan is to move to the city. Asked where he’s looking, Jonsson rattled off a shortlist of neighborhoods, speaking like a man who had indeed been doing his reconnaissance.