LA wildfires force thousands to evacuate, NASA JPL closed

Re:LA wildfires force thousands to evacuate, NASA JPL closed by lightedman on Thursday January 09, 2025 @12:39AM (#42641984)

"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."

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.

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Re:LA wildfires force thousands to evacuate, NASA JPL closed by defrost on Thursday January 09, 2025 @12:51AM (#42642044)

It was a 17M cut from a greater than $800 million Fire allocation, not 23M. Of that:

> 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.

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