There’s a new streets director coming to City Hall. A name familiar to court watchers is taking over the Office of Violence Prevention. Another colonel is coming in, this time as deputy of city operations. And rounding out the City Hall shake-up, the director of the city’s Community Development Administration is on his way out.
Both Marvin Teer and Bryan Barroqueiro have been spotted around City Hall in recent weeks—they are the new head of the Office of Violence Prevention and the new deputy chief of operations, respectively.
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Teer, a former St. Louis City municipal court judge, joined the Circuit Attorney’s Office in 2021 to bring stability to the troubled office then run by Kim Gardner. He served as the office’s chief trial assistant, handling high-profile cases such as the successful prosecution of the man who killed police officer David Dorn amid upheaval in the city following the 2020 murder of George Floyd. Teer left the office in the final days of Gardner’s tenure before coming back to work for Gabe Gore. As the head of the Office of Violence Prevention he’ll be leading an agency that coordinates public safety and violence intervention programs—rather than prosecuting criminals, his new job will see him trying to stop crimes from happening.
Barroqueiro, though a less familiar name, has strong ties to the region, having served as a colonel in the U.S. Air Force stationed at Scott Air Force Base. He is a resident of downtown St. Louis. He will serve as deputy chief of operations, second to Colonel Ben Jonsson, who has sought to bring a sort of military efficiency that can often be anathema to city government. Already under his relatively brief tenure, Jonsson sought to streamline city trash pick up, recycling and snow removal.
It was the lack of snow removal from the streets earlier this year that led to Bertherny Williams’ dismissal as the streets director in April, shortly after Mayor Cara Spencer took office. Williams was on leave when the January blizzard hit and was initially nonchalant in front of an aldermanic committee hearing—conducted when streets were still iced over—about the city’s inadequate response, which left streets iced over for 10 days. Two weeks after taking office Spencer swiftly appointed Jim Suelmann as interim streets director. Now a new permanent hire has been made, sources at City Hall say, with details to be announced very soon.
Rounding out the City Hall shake-up is the departure of Nahuel Fefer, who is leaving his job as executive director of the Community Development Administration, the agency that coordinates funding for local projects from federal, state, and nonprofit sources. A veteran of the Slay and Jones administrations, he has been at the top job in CDA since August 2022. His departure is said to be amicable. Fefer did not respond last week to an email seeking comment.
CORRECTION: A previous version of this story misstated where Marvin Teer formerly sat on the bench.
Hear from Naheul Fefer, former executive director of the CDA, on The 314 Podcast (recorded March 2026).
