Hyperbolic statements like "gutted" are just meant to get the knee jerk, frothing at the mouth "retweet" kind of reaction, and it seems to be being successful at that.
https://www.nbclosangeles.com/news/california-wildfires/la-w...
> The budget reduction, approved last year by Mayor Karen Bass, was mostly absorbed by leaving many administrative jobs unfilled, but that left about $7 million that was cut from its overtime budget that was used for training, fire prevention, and other key functions.
> The variable overtime hours, called "V-Hours" within the LAFD, were used to pay for FAA-mandated pilot training and helicopter coordination staffing for wildfire suppression, the memo said.
"Without this funding, pilot compliance and readiness are jeopardized, and aerial firefighting capabilities are diminished," it said. "Changes to the Air Operations Section impact the Department's ability to adhere to current automatic and mutual aid agreements, provide air ambulance service, and quickly respond to woodland fires with water dropping helicopters."
> The memo also highlighted other programs that would suffer under the cuts, including the Disaster Response Section, which funds the bulldozer teams that cut breaks and control lines around wildfires, and the Critical Incident Planning and Training Section, which develops plans for major emergencies.
So.. cheers for the update and context, that does highlight a 'loss' of $7 million in training alocation from an over 800 million budget.
Do 'we' hold the state of California responsible here for allocating less overall, or the LA Fire Chief for perhaps not making the best use of what was allocated to them.
I'm an outsider and I'm avoiding throwing shade, just highlighting the complexity of budget issues.
If the blame goes to the state then attention should be paid to the page 6 water flow from revenue to expenditures - if Fire needs more then Police(?) must get less .. etc.
Cali Budget: https://cao.lacity.gov/budget/summary/2024-25%20Budget%20Sum...
(page 11) $774 million went to salaries, $46 million to expenses.
https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2024-07-09/californ...
Sure, and to that end the Police and Fire together make up in excess of 60% of the entire budget.
Should all income go to the Fire Dept? (Obviously not) .. again, I'm an outsider, but from a helicopter perspective there already a good sized portion of the budget going towards Fire as a priority already. Should some of the Police budget be cut and redirected?
One a portion of total available has been allocated it does rather fall to the Fire Chief to make the most of what has been granted.
The challenge appears to be how to make what's available go the furtherest.
Here, not California, we make considerable use of volunteers .. well equiped and large well trained volunteers with solid liability insurance should they toast themselves and backed by a professional full time core.
I dare say similar things happen in California, I note the use of the prison population in fire fighting.
It's a tough problem domain, not helped by all the outside hot takes on twitter and elsewhere that casually claim budgets are being gutted, etc.
I'm as far from this situation as you can be, but yes, absolutely, it's ridiculous how much money is set on fire on ineffective budget items, while at the same time AFAIU the police force is not really held responsible to do its job.
Of the LA City Fiscal Year 2025 (July 1, 2024 - June 30, 2025) of $12.90 billion, $1.98 billion (15.36%) is Police and $820 million (6.36%) is Fire. Combined, this is less than 22%, not in excess of 60%.
https://openbudget.lacity.org/#!/year/2025/operating/0/depar...
We just had a record dry year followed by a warm and wet start to summer which has caused a bunch of new growth, thats going to die and dry come Feb and i'll be keeping a go bag in my car.
E.g. Retirement benefits and debt service took up 43% of Chicago’s budget in 2022: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/30/opinion/chicago-illinois-.... A decade ago my wife and I decided to abandon our efforts to move back to the city (where we went to law school) because we saw this coming.
It's not like suburbs aren't sitting on financial bombs either.
I moved to unincorporated exurban Maryland. The state government is a mess, but it’s mostly preoccupied dealing with Baltimore. Our county is great. Good schools with modest per student spending, the friendliest police I’ve ever interacted with. Even our county landfill is one of the cleanest and most orderly facilities I’ve ever seen. Nicer than most of New York City for sure.
And of course, even if you were willing to spend several hours a day commuting, if you're in California exurban areas aren't exactly safer from wildfires.
I grew up in northern VA in the 1990s and I thought that the whole of America (besides NYC obviously) was like that. Super clean, orderly, and efficient. Then I lived in Wilmington Delaware, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and DC, and it reminded me too much of the third world.
Reminds me of a video (part of series), titled "Why American Cities Are Broke - The Growth Ponzi Scheme". Previous HN submission and discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32495647
TLDR: Suburban and certain commercial development is money-loser because tax-revenue is way under the long-term costs of the infrastructure to support it, and already denser areas (including the housing of poorer people) are subsidizing spread-out/richer zones.
But both that site and its readers have tried to apply that conclusion to suburbs of major cities, which is ludicrously wrong to anyone that actually knows anything about the causes of municipal bankruptcy (almost always due to pension obligations , and often in a vicious cycle with high taxes raised to pay for pensions that drive away residents).
Most budgeting should be moved to the state level, IMO. It's crazy for Western Springs, Atherton and Beverly Hills to waste money while Chicago and Oakland fall behind. If some magnates decide to move to Texas as a result, good riddance. The dependence on property taxes is particularly perverse, as it incentivizes the housing pyramid scheme.
This guy is my county executive: https://www.aacounty.org/pittmanandfriends. I trust him to make sure our trash gets picked up on time and to keep the community safe. I certainly don’t trust the Maryland government to do that.
And your point doesn’t contradict mine. The homeowners in my county are highly informed and conscientious voters, and their decisions are good for most of the people who already live in the county.
I agree in certain circumstances, including land use, you want to make decisions at the state level. But for most government services, like education, policing, local roads, etc., I want Kim who runs our HOA to be voting on who makes those decisions and hassling those officials to keep them accountable.
In any case, we don't seem to disagree all that much. My original point was more legislative than executive in nature. Local executive accountability is desirable, provided that the budgeting and rulemaking were made uniform state-wide. Education already works that way.
The entire state of New Jersey exists to pay pensions. The 2025 general budget is $55 billion, $7 billion went to funding the pension for one year, again.
https://cao.lacity.gov/budget/summary/2024-25%20Budget%20Sum...
(This PDF is great, props to whoever made it for making it so easy and accessible for normal people to read.)
If you look at the pie chart on Page 11, you will see that by far the largest slice of the pie is the police budget. It's 45% of LA County's entire budget, totalling almost $2 billion. The LAPD's budget for one fiscal year is larger than most country's GDPs, yet crime is still rampant in Los Angeles. So that's the first place I would start. You could probably find $23 million sitting between the couch cushions at LAPD's headquarters.
The fire budget is ~800M. Pretty significant by itself.
You keep throwing around this 23M number like a 3% change would make a material impact on 3 fast-spreading huge fires in worst-case-scenario conditions.
What do you think the budget would need to be to handle this? In a scenario that goes deep, such as how water pressure is low because of how much demand is coming from so many hydrants? 100M more? 200M? 500M? 1B?
Is committing to that much more annually the best solution here?
Take 23M and tell me how many firefighters that'd hire, plus equipment to support them. then tell me if that equipment would've been sufficient to at least contain the fires instead of having the damage we have now.
Protip as a former Memphis FD Volunteer: Every damn dollar counts.
> The budget reduction, approved last year by Mayor Karen Bass, was mostly absorbed by leaving many administrative jobs unfilled, but that left about $7 million that was cut from its overtime budget that was used for training, fire prevention, and other key functions
(see up thread peer comment for source)
Further, with a constrained revenue and something like 63% of the entiire state budget going to Police and Fire it appears that the California Fire budget lost out a little to the California Police budget.
There's the arena for fighting this out, a good old badge on badge bar fight over $$$'s.
In case anyone was curious, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nomi... suggests that ~17 countries have a GDP of less than $2 billion per year. Seeing as how there are 193+ countries, this means that the LAPD budget exceeds the GDP of fewer than 10% of countries. (The median country GDP is ~$50 billion per year.)
For some extra context: while these 17 countries include some very poor countries, the primary reason that they have such small GDPs is their small population. Their combined population is approximately the same as the city of Los Angeles.
Some should go to policing, yes, community policing should increase, working the stats should decrease, dedicated mental health professionals should be funded and replace a good number of police interactions, etc.
This is a large and complex topic that deserves better than ankle deep engagement.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Community_Resources_Against_...
"...why are we cutting fire department budgets when wildfires are becoming more frequent..."
If you're going to say we need more money budgeted to the Fire Dept. because fires are becoming frequent and then say in your next breath we need to cut the budget of the Police because crime is becoming more frequent....
That said, I'm sure there is plenty of opportunity to cut waste too and in addition to slashing the police budget a great way to recover some tax money being burned by the police would be to clean up the department so that taxpayers aren't on the hook for the millions spent in lawsuits generated by their repeated abuses, screw ups, workplace injustices, etc. Much of that actually would be free money.
If the strategy isn't working at $2 billion, what makes you think it will start working at $2.1 billion?
The responsibility is on the supporters to demonstrate the efficacy of the current approach. Where are the results?
If you've been following this, they've done a fairly amazing job at knocking out maybe a dozen fires in the past two days. Many of these had the potential to be giant infernos and you can actively see very clear evidence of them being contained and suppressed as the fire crews responded.
The evacuation orders and rescue operations were also effective and remarkably little life has been lost.
There's plenty of direct material evidence to demonstrate the efficacy of fire fighting.
On the contrary, there's things like the 1992 Watts truce, which is credited with a rapid decline in LA street violence, where law enforcement was not a participant of.
So unlike with say fire-fighting, there's empirically more effective strategies for dealing with crime. They do, however, require us to not be ideologically committed to punitive incarceration.
That's like arguing that since Los Angeles public school's budget is $18.8 billion[1], yet scores are still poor[2], we should cut the public school budget.
[1] https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2024-06-26/lausd-ap... [2] https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2024-10-11/lausd-ma...
Wouldn't that be the same as advocating for cuts in the LAFD funding because they weren't able to do much about the wildfires anyway?
That doesn't seem to be the best way to go about things, at least not to me.
Studies have found "no consistent correlations between increased police spending and municipal crime rates". Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/27/world/canada/canada-lette...
Unlike policing, where clear alternatives to it like mental healthcare, drug rehabilitation and social welfare programs exist, there isn't really an alternative to the firefighting service for stopping fires.
Meanwhile, people aren't necessarily concerned with the crime rate, per se. There are crimes we care about more than others, namely, violent personal crimes: muggings, felonious assault, rape, and murder. Close on its heels are property crimes: breaking and entering, vandalism, and robbery.
Given the crimes the majority of the people actually care about, can we say that the LA crime rate has not gone down?
Meanwhile, 20% of the hydrants ran dry in the Palisades. Increased LAFD funding isn't going to change anything about that. This isn't even getting into whether it's reasonable for a municipal government to be prepared to battle a wildfire enveloping an entire region. I don't think there's a city in the United States that could take that on.
https://cao.lacity.gov/budget/summary/2024-25%20Budget%20Sum...
Page 6 shows a water flow from revenues to expenditures.
And why is there apparently no water in the fire hydrants? Something about the reservoir not being refilled appropriately?
They emptied the tanks fighting the fire.
From the article in the GP comment:
The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power in a Wednesday press conference refuted claims, including those made by Caruso, that water tanks in Pacific Palisades weren’t fully filled ahead of the fire.
Departmental officials said the three tanks in the area were filled to capacity with around 1 million gallons of water each, but those supplies were tapped out by early Wednesday morning.
“We ran out of water and the first tank about 4:45pm yesterday, we ran out of water on the second tank about 8:30pm and the third tank about 3am this morning,” said Janisse Quiñones, CEO of LADWP.What are your thoughts on that question?
I'm in Australia, while I cannot personally answer your question wrt these specific tanks I do imagine there was some means by which they were filled to the brim.
Fire tanks are generally "slow to fill* and "fast to empty" in relative terms - they form a local cache for rapid drawdown at rates much faster than "normal" water system draw.
There's also strong element in twitter and US news of petty critic for politic points .. "The hydrants are empty and there's no water" might be that kind of complaint, eg: "we emptied the tanks here holding the fire front back, the front has now moved, the tanks are now refilling" might well be the source of what became a damning meme "the hydrants are empty".
Unfortunately we have a news article reporting a tweet.
"Gutted" as a descripter seems extreme and the details that matter are whether these reductions simply trimmed fat, or denied something essential that would have made all the difference here.