As wildfires have swept through Los Angeles, devastating the Pacific Palisades and surrounding neighbourhoods, many people have taken to the internet to blame the destruction on the mayor and budget cuts.
The critics included the Los Angeles Times owner, Patrick Soon-Shiong. “Fires in LA are sadly no surprise,” Soon-Shiong wrote on January 8 on X, “yet the Mayor cut LA Fire Department’s budget by $23M.”
City records show that Mayor Karen Bass proposed in April to cut the Los Angeles Fire Department’s budget by $23m as the city experienced lower tax revenues and higher costs. The City Council in May modified and approved the budget, cutting the department’s budget by $17.6m. Bass signed the city budget in June, giving the fire department about $819.6m, a 2 percent decrease from its 2023-2024 budget.
City officials, including Bass, maintain that the cuts have not affected the department’s response to the fires. They pointed to the unprecedented winds that supercharged the flames, making the fires nearly impossible to fight.
Local fire officials also say the high winds made the situation insurmountable for firefighters, but they also reiterate that systemic underfunding and recent budget cuts have hindered the department’s ability to respond to emergencies like wildfires.
The June budget eliminated 73 vacant civilian positions and reduced available overtime money by $7.9m. Fire Chief Kristin Crowley says those cuts have affected “core operations”, including payroll and community education programmes.
Fire department salary negotiations
Bass signed the budget as the city separately negotiated a new contract with the United Firefighters of Los Angeles City, the city’s firefighters union, over a pay increase. After negotiations ended in November, the city provided an additional $76m for fire department salaries, City Council officials told PolitiFact, a fact-checking website.
So the department’s total 2024-2025 budget eventually amounted to $895.6m.
The budget increase was specific to salaries and didn’t address areas that were cut in the budget or resources that local fire officials said they need to adequately serve the community.
The council also approved $58m for new fire trucks and other department purchases, according to reporting by the Los Angeles Times.
What the fire chief has said about the department’s funding
In December, Crowley wrote a memo to the Board of Fire Commissioners, a five-person civilian board that oversees the department, is appointed by the mayor and confirmed by the City Council. Crowley warned that cutting the civilian positions and overtime hours diminished the department’s ability to complete core functions and prepare for large-scale emergencies.
In a January 10 interview, Norah O’Donnell of CBS News asked Crowley about the $17.6m cut and whether it made a difference in the department’s response to the fires, which began on January 7. Crowley said the department reduced “nonessential” responsibilities. After more questioning, Crowley said the cuts limited the department’s response to the fires “to a certain factor”.
Crowley told O’Donnell the department used all available resources, but the high winds complicated the response.
“I would say in a wind event like this, … if I had 1,000 engines to throw at this fire, I honestly don’t think 1,000 engines at that very moment could have tapped this fire down.”
In an interview on Friday with the TV station Fox 11 Los Angeles, however, Crowley was more blunt about how the cut affected the response, saying the department was not “properly” funded.
“Yes, it was cut, and it did impact our ability to provide service,” she said. “Any budget cut is going to impact our ability to provide service.”
Freddy Escobar, the local firefighters union’s president, told The New York Times the eliminated positions meant there were fewer mechanics available to maintain the department’s trucks and engines and the fire chief could have also used overtime pay for crews.
Fire chief’s warnings and city’s defence
Crowley’s December 4 memo wasn’t the first letter she sent expressing budgetary concerns.
Crowley told the fire commission in a separate memo in November that the department’s size hadn’t grown much since the 1960s despite the city’s surging population, according to reporting by The New York Times. She wrote that despite steep rises in its call volume, the city had not allocated enough staffing or new fire stations to respond to emergencies effectively.
At a January 8 news conference, meanwhile, Bass said she was “confident” that the fire department’s budget hadn’t affected its ability to respond to the wildfires. She implied that fire department spending would exceed the budgeted amount for the year.
Jacob Robbie, the fire department’s public information officer, said at the same news conference that the fires were “absolutely unprecedented” and no fire department could be prepared for it. He did not respond to questions about the department’s budget or training, deferring those questions to Crowley, who had left the news conference.
In a news conference a day later, Bass said the fires’ severity, not the department’s budget, was to blame for the destruction and referred to the additional salary money that was negotiated in November.
“If you go back and look at the reductions that were made, there were no reductions that were made that would have impacted the situation that we were dealing with over the last couple of days,” Bass said. “There was a little bit of confusion because money was allocated to be distributed later on, which was actually going to support salaries and other parts of the fire department that were distributed a little later.”
City Administrative Officer Matt Szabo told the Los Angeles Times that overall fire department overtime increased in this year’s budget by nearly $18m. He said budget reductions did not limit the number of firefighters who responded to the Palisades Fire or how long they worked.
