Leaked Memo Shows LA Mayor Bass Demanded $49 Million Budget Cut from Fire Department One Day Before Fires Broke Out

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Requested just days before deadly fires broke out and devastated swathes of Los Angeles, Mayor Karen Bass “demanded her Fire Department make an extra $49 million of budget cuts” on top of the already determined $17.6million of cuts in her latest budget.

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A leaked memo revealed Bass made the request, which would have shut down 16 fire stations and crippled the department’s ability to respond to emergencies, sources said, according to the Daily Mail.

The memo was exclusively obtained through an LA Fire Department LAFD whistleblower by DailyMail.com, which interviewed multiple current and former senior LAFD officers briefed on the proposed cuts.

Dated January 6, just one day before the devastating Palisades Fire started, sources say it was sent from LAFD ‘top brass’ at City Hall to division chiefs and captains – after a fraught meeting the previous Friday between Chief Kristin Crowley and Mayor Bass.

‘The LAFD is still going through a FY [financial year] 2024/2025 $48.8million budget reduction exercise with the CAO [City Attorney’s Office],’ the document said.

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‘The only way to provide a cost savings would be to close as many as 16 fire stations (not resources, fire stations); this equates to at least one fire station per City Council District.

‘The details of this plan have not yet been developed. This is a worst-case scenario and is NOT happening yet.’

‘They did not want this out. It’s an internal memo not to be distributed,’ one currently-serving 25-year veteran of the Fire Department told DailyMail.com. ‘It comes from top brass downtown, City Hall.

Sources briefed on the memo said Bass first made the demand for tens of millions from the cash-strapped department in a meeting with Chief Crowley on Friday.

‘They’re trying to allocate more money for the homeless, and they need to start taking from everybody. ‘But we already exhausted our budget. It’s already tapped. That’s why they cut the fire academy in half, so they could save more money. That’s why we’re not testing if hydrants work anymore. We’re doing everything we can to save money.

‘We have fire engines we can’t get parts for. When one breaks down we strip it of parts to put on other fire engines because we can’t buy any more parts.
‘If you shut down 16 stations, that’s about 750 personnel. Then they expect us to take the same call volume. And yesterday we did 3,800 calls, almost twice of what our daily call volume usually is.

‘We’re already shy 200 paramedics, and we’re on the verge of another 200 quitting because we can’t do this anymore.

‘If we don’t work overtime, they suspend and threaten to terminate us. It’s untenable.’

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