Did Mayor Karen Bass really cut the fire department budget? The answer gets tricky
When Mayor Karen Bass unveiled her budget plan for 2024-25, she called for a 2.7% reduction in spending at the Los Angeles Fire Department.
Her proposal, unveiled in April, sought $23 million in cuts to the department, with much of it focused on reduced equipment purchases.
But while her citywide spending proposal was being reviewed, Bass was also in closed-door negotiations over a major boost in pay for the city’s 3,300 firefighters. Those pay hikes — four years of raises and an array of other financial incentives — were not finalized until several months after her budget went into effect.
The City Council approved the firefighter raises in November, adding more than $53 million in additional salary costs. By then, the council had also signed off on $58 million for new firetrucks and other department purchases.
Once those two line items were added, the fire department’s operating budget actually grew by more than 7% compared to the prior fiscal year, according to the city’s financial analysts.
The issue of fire department spending, boring and burdened with specifics in normal times, is now a critical issue in Los Angeles following the massive destruction caused by a wildfire in Pacific Palisades, which continues to burn. The Eaton fire, which has destroyed swaths of Altadena, is outside L.A. city limits.
While the L.A. fire department’s annual operating budget has been growing overall — and is on track to exceed $950 million — the agency also has had to scale back some of its operations.
Bass and other officials said the reductions have not affected the department’s ability to fight the Palisades fire.
After the blaze broke out on Tuesday, critics of the Los Angeles Police Department seized on the numbers in Bass’ 2024-25 budget document, arguing that funds allocated for police came at the expense of firefighters. Elon Musk, owner of the social media platform X, shared a post that bemoaned “LAFD underfunding.” Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong, who owns the Los Angeles Times, has also criticized the city’s handling of the fire department budget on social media and elsewhere.
Bass, who was in Africa when the fire broke out, has sought to counter the budget cut narrative, saying that spending at the department has grown during the current year. She said funding for firefighter raises was part of her budget from the beginning — but was included in an account separate from the fire department budget.
“Money was allocated to be distributed later on, which actually went to support salaries and other parts of the fire department,” Bass told reporters at a briefing on Thursday.
Local fire officials acknowledged Wednesday that they were overwhelmed by the power and size of the four major fires burning in Los Angeles County.
Last year, faced with a serious budget crunch, Bass and the council eliminated dozens of civilian positions in the department, all of them already vacant.
Those cuts have hampered “core functions” in the department, including payroll, community education programs and the equity and human resources bureau, which addresses personnel grievances and workplace equity, according to a Dec. 4 memo by Fire Chief Kristin Crowley.
In her memo, Crowley said a $7-million reduction in overtime variable staffing hours, or “v-hours,” had “severely limited the department’s capacity to prepare for, train for, and respond to large-scale emergencies, including wildfires.”
According to the memo, the loss of the overtime funding has hindered the department’s ability to test radio equipment, complete pilot training and carry out brush clearance inspections, which are “crucial for mitigating fire risks in high-hazard areas.”
When it comes to the fires, there’s a lot to talk about. But can we do so as grown-ups, without using an epic disaster as a political piñata?
Crowley, appearing Friday on Fox11, was asked whether the city of Los Angeles failed her and her department. After the question was posed multiple times, she said, “Yes.”
City Administrative Officer Matt Szabo, whose office helps prepare the city budget, said that overall fire department overtime, counting all categories, actually increased in this year’s budget by nearly $18 million. In addition, he said the budget reductions did not limit the number of firefighters who responded to the Palisades fire, or how long they worked.
“The fire department is authorized to deploy whatever emergency resources are necessary, and those costs will be covered — as they are every year,” Szabo said.
Bass, appearing at the news conference earlier this week, echoed that message, saying the reductions at the fire department “did not impact what we’ve been going through the last few days.”
Freddy Escobar, president of the United Firefighters of Los Angeles City Local 112, said he does not fault Bass over her handling of fire department spending. At the same time, he said, “the fire chief does not have the money to staff the resources that are needed” to address the city’s public safety needs.
“Unfortunately, everything was lined up to have a disaster,” Escobar said in an interview. “And it occurred with winds that were 80, 85 miles per hour.”
Jack Humphreville, who serves on the watchdog group Neighborhood Council Budget Advocates, said the fire department had to scale back operations to make way for employee raises. Now, employee overtime from the Palisades fire, along with pay increases approved for the entire city workforce, are going to make the city budget crunch worse — at least in the short term, he said.
“I think the city’s in for a real world of hurt,” he said.
In May, the City Council approved the mayor’s 2024-25 budget, reducing the size of her proposed spending reductions at the fire department to $17 million, down from $23 million. Councilmember Traci Park, for example, was able to restore funds for a handful of department mechanics.
As part of the budget, more than $100 million for salary increases was placed into an account known as the “unappropriated balance,” which serves as something of a holding tank for expenses that are expected but not finalized. About half of those funds were set aside for firefighter raises, Szabo said.
Those looking to assist residents affected by the Los Angeles County firestorm have a number of options to donate money, materials or their time.
The money went into that account, and not the fire department one, because the city’s labor negotiating committee, made up of Bass and four council members, had not yet signed off on the firefighter contract, Szabo said. The deal also needed to go to the firefighter union for a ratification vote by its members — and could have been rejected, requiring additional negotiations.
That four-year agreement, which included annual pay hikes of 3% and improved healthcare benefits, provided the same types of increases that Los Angeles police officers received a year earlier, according to a city analysis. The starting salary for a firefighter is $85,315, Szabo said, and is expected to reach $90,514 in the coming months, not including overtime and bonuses.
Szabo said he will ask the council in the coming weeks to move the $53 million for firefighter raises out of the unappropriated balance and into the fire department budget. The salary deal will consume an additional $23 million in increased pension and healthcare costs, he said.
Separately, the council is expected to put into the fire department budget an additional $27 million for the transportation of MediCal patients by city paramedics, a service that will be reimbursed by the state.
Those changes, planned last year, would push the fire department’s operating budget to $963 million — a 9% increase over the previous year, Szabo said.
A reservoir in the Palisades that holds 117 million gallons of water was offline this month for previously scheduled maintenance.
Tracking spending at the city’s public safety agencies is a difficult task. Both the police and fire departments routinely overspend their budgets, particularly after emergencies or unexpected public safety needs.
Bass’ first budget as mayor, covering the 2023-24 fiscal year, allocated $837 million to the fire department. By the time she released the 2024-25 budget, her office was expecting fire department spending for that first year to exceed $900 million.
Last month, Szabo informed the council that the fire department had already begun to overspend its budget for the new budget year, due to expenditures such as overtime pay.
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