In August, David Weidler stepped into his role as the new Crestwood city administrator. Since coming to the city, Weidler says he has been getting to know its procedures, staff and community members as he takes on the staff leadership position.
The role of city administrator was left vacant by Kris Simpson in January, with Chief of Police Jonathan Williams serving as acting city administrator until Weidler’s recent start date.
Weidler spoke with The Call about his government experience prior to coming to Crestwood, as well as what he hopes to accomplish as city administrator.
“It really helps forward the organization when you can put in a lot of good procedures, review the current practices, look for new opportunities to save taxpayer money,” Weidler said about his role. “That has been a major focus in my career so far — looking at different ways to improve what our spend is, different ways to save taxpayer money as much as possible.”
Weidler noted that development in Crestwood has been an emphasis for him. He says he wants to “get in a good position” to “encourage appropriate development” throughout the city. Weidler says this includes thinking about what is best for the community: both its residents and visitors.
“There’s a lot of great opportunity occurring here with the redevelopment along Watson Road, a lot of the new signalization and updates to one of the main corridors in town,” Weidler said. “There’s also previous redevelopment of the Dierbergs site and what that can mean to drawing businesses into the area.”
Before he was hired at Crestwood, Weidler worked for 16 years in the City of Kirkwood, where he served as Assistant Chief Administrative Officer since 2021. He also served for a short period as the city’s Interim Chief Administrative Officer.
During his time in Kirkwood, he worked with a range of departments: emergency management and safety, IT, communications, fleet facilities, procurement, human resources and more. Weidler says that his experience working with different departments has prepared him well for being the city administrator of Crestwood.
“I have a lot of history there, dealing with multiple departments,” Weidler said. “A lot of my experience, especially when it comes to emergency management and financial training, some of the communications side, facility and fleet maintenance — those are all direct impacts to what we do here (at Crestwood) on a daily basis.”
He says training through his master’s degree in public policy administration from the University of Missouri-St. Louis and involvement in the International City/County Management Association (ICMA) has provided him with resources in leadership.
“It has given me a lot of great tools in leadership to help craft and steer an organization,” Weidler said.
It was an intensive hiring process, Weidler says, that consisted of several rounds of interviews, meetings with the staff and aldermen and tours of the city.
“Overall, what drew me to Crestwood is the strong sense of community pride, the redevelopment opportunities and the desire to keep moving forward in a thoughtful manner,” Weidler said. “You can see the community pride in some of the events here. We just recently had Crestwood Night Out, which was a huge success. There’s the upcoming SunCrest Fest. There’s a whole bunch of other things that go on in Crestwood that really show the involvement of the community.”
For Crestwood residents who haven’t met Weidler yet, he says his door is always open, but that he is also planning to make it to “as many events as possible” in the fall.
“I’m excited to be here. I love interacting with everyone I’ve met out in the community so far,” Weidler said. “Looking forward to meeting everybody.”
