Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass sought swingeing cuts to the LA fire department as recently as last week, asking for $49 million to be cut from its budget just days before the most devastating fires in the city’s history.
The Daily Mail reports that the cuts would have led to the closure of 16 fire stations. The Mail learned of the cuts from a memo dated 6 January that was sent to division chiefs after Bass met with Chief Kristin Crowley the week before.
“The LAFD is still going through a FY [financial year] 2024/2025 $48.8million budget reduction exercise with the CAO [City Attorney’s Office],” the memo states.
“The only way to provide a cost savings would be to close as many as 16 fire stations (not resources, fire stations); this equates to at least one fire station per City Council District.”
“The details of this plan have not yet been developed. This is a worst-case scenario and is NOT happening yet,” the memo added.
The nearly $50 million cut would have been in addition to the $17.6 million that had already been cut from the city’s firefighting budget. Chief Crowley said that the original cut “severely limited the department’s capacity to prepare for, train for, and respond to large-scale emergencies, including wildfires.”
An employee of the LA Fire Department spoke to reports and told them City Hall “did not want this [the memo] out.”
“It comes from top brass downtown, City Hall. They’re trying to allocate more money for the homeless, and they need to start taking from everybody. But we already exhausted our budget. It’s already tapped. That’s why they cut the fire academy in half, so they could save more money.”
“That’s why we’re not testing if hydrants work anymore. We’re doing everything we can to save money. We have fire engines we can’t get parts for. When one breaks down we strip it of parts to put on other fire engines because we can’t buy anymore parts. If you shut down 16 stations, that’s about 750 personnel. Then they expect us to take the same call volume. And yesterday we did 3,800 calls, almost twice of what our daily call volume usually is.”
It’s now reckoned the wildfires, which have killed at least 10 people and destroyed thousands of properties, including historic homes and iconic architectural treasures, could cost as much as $150 billion.