Earlier than wildfires broke out throughout Los Angeles, the town’s fireplace chief mentioned that price range cuts have been hampering the division’s means to answer emergencies, a division memo exhibits.
Funding for the town’s fireplace division decreased by $17.6 million, or 2%, between the 2024-25 fiscal yr and the 2023-24 fiscal yr, based on metropolis price range paperwork. Nonetheless, the town council in November authorized a four-year $203 million contract with the firefighter’s union to assist enhance wages and well being advantages for employees, drawing from the price range’s common fund.
The price range cuts drew criticism as firefighters scrambled to include the ongoing fires.
In a Dec. 4 memo, LAFD Hearth Chief Kristin Crowley wrote to the Board of Hearth Commissioners that the price range cuts “have adversely affected the Department’s ability to maintain core operations.”
Crowley mentioned {that a} $7 million discount in additional time hours “severely limited the Department’s capacity to prepare for, train for, and respond to large-scale emergencies” and affected their capability for brush clearance inspections and residential inspections.
The cuts, Crowley wrote in a memo from July 2024, resulted from eliminating 58 positions, adjusting sworn wage accounts, and eradicating one-time bills. Some have pointed to the one-time bills, resembling the acquisition of latest respiration tools for firefighters, a one cause why there could have been a discount within the present fiscal yr’s price range in comparison with the yr earlier than.
When requested concerning the price range cuts at Thursday morning’s press convention, Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass mentioned they didn’t affect the division’s means to deal with the continued fires.
“There were no reductions that were made that would have impacted the situation that we were dealing with over the last couple of days,” she mentioned. She additionally emphasised the extra funds the division was set to obtain from the town’s contract with the union. “The unprecedented wind storm, wind at such ferocity that we haven’t seen in years, is the context in which we were dealing with this.”
Crowley and the Board of Hearth Commissioner’s workplace didn’t instantly reply to a request for remark. On the board’s Dec. 17 assembly, its president Genethia Hudley-Hayes acknowledged the funding and staffing points.
“It is not unfair to say that we are in crisis mode within the Los Angeles Fire Department,” Hudley-Hayes mentioned. “Anybody who knows a council person really and truly needs to be either going to city council, talking to their council person, talking in their neighborhood councils, doing whatever they need to do because we really are at a crisis point.”
The hearth division overspent by an estimated $66.6 million within the 2023-24 fiscal yr, this yr’s price range exhibits, with unbudgeted contracts, unused sick time and additional time accounting for a lot of the overspending.
In a assertion when the price range was authorized, Bass mentioned the town price range acted as a “reset.”
“This budget serves as a reset, in part by continuing to hire for critical positions including police officers and firefighters while eliminating some of the department’s vacant positions, thereby prioritizing our City family over empty desks,” Bass mentioned.
Whereas the fireplace division’s price range was reduce, the police division’s price range elevated by $125.9 million, a roughly 7% enhance.
There are 28 fireplace departments in Los Angeles County along with the town’s fireplace division. All are responding to the continued fires, together with firefighters from 5 further states. Gov. Gavin Newsom activated California Nationwide Guard members to assist battle the blazes, and the Protection Division has additionally supplied tools and manpower to struggle the fires.
contributed to this report.
