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ST. LOUIS — Mayor Cara Spencer on Thursday marked her 100th day in office with a press conference lauding the city’s resilience in recovering from the May tornado, touting progress on improving city services and promising to fix the troubled city jail.

She acknowledged that not everything has gone according to plan. “But we still have a lot to celebrate,” she said.

She applauded the combined efforts of city employees, residents and businesses in helping respond to and clean up after the May 16 tornado that killed five people and damaged thousands of buildings across north ӣ����Ƶ.

“I have never been more inspired by the city of St Louis than I am today,” she said.

She also tallied the more than $100 million in aid secured from federal, state and city coffers to rebuild in the path of the storm, and said her team is working to get the money deployed where it is needed.

She said staff had also expedited contracts to replace the city’s aging siren system, which did not go off on the day of the storm.

And while she said tornado recovery remains the No. 1 task for her administration, she is also working on city services, which she pledged to improve on the campaign trail: More than 1,800 potholes have been fixed since she took office, reducing the backlog by 70%. Long-awaited repaving of Kingshighway and Union Boulevard is ongoing. The short-staffed office that approves development plans for the city has been beefed up.

“It’s important that we continue our focus on high-quality city services,” Spencer said.

Activists upset about the state of the city’s downtown jail interrupted Spencer as she was taking questions. They criticized her administration for continuing to prosecute Janis Mensah, a former jail oversight board member arrested for trespassing at the jail in search of answers about an inmate death.

And Mensah, whose charge was dismissed earlier Thursday, demanded Spencer released video of the final hours of Samuel Hayes Jr., an inmate who was found dead in the jail Saturday night.

Spencer told activists and reporters that relatives of Hayes had seen the video earlier in the week, and that the administration is working to release it more broadly as soon as it is legally possible.

She said she had not seen the video herself. But she said the case was heartbreaking, and reaffirmed her campaign pledges to make the jail, in whose custody 20 people have died since 2020, a more humane place.

“We are committed to making the jail a place where we all feel confident that anybody, incarcerated or otherwise, can feel safe,” she said.