NEW: Bass Demanded $49M in Additional LAFD Cuts One Week Before Wildfires.
The LAFD is still going through a FY2024/2025 $48.8 million budget reduction exercise with the CAO. The Fire Chief, Board of Fire Commissioners, COA, and UFLAC are steadfast in their message of defending what resources we currently have in place. 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. The Fire Chief will have a “Chat with the Chief” webinar next week to clarify the situation and the budget.
I’ll just assume that the webinar was postponed … indefinitely.
The LAFD has already had its budget slashed enough that it can’t conduct necessary maintenance tasks, on its own equipment and on infrastructure for fighting fires. One LAFD veteran told the Daily Mail that they don’t even have the budget to test hydrants any longer, and that Bass has been draining those resources to fund homeless programs:
‘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 any more. We’re doing everything we can to save money.
“Charlie Peters’ ‘Fireman First’ principle says you always threaten to cut firemen in order to create a public outcry against budget cuts. You’re not supposed to actually do it,” Mickey Kaus tweeted yesterday, as a reminder of just how incompetent Bass is.
More at the Free Press: Paradise Lost.
But this isn’t just about Bass. A great city can survive a bad mayor, or even a series of bad mayors. This is a story about the failure of California to prevent, or capably mitigate, a long-predicted catastrophe, and how a state that was once a model of good governance came to prioritize the boutique concerns of ambitious politicians over the basics of what government must do.
There are always excuses in moments like these, some more valid than others. California is, in a sense, built to burn: Its warm climate and vast woodlands can, and often are, a deadly combination. Any city, regardless of who’s running it, would struggle with winds reaching 100 miles per hour, especially one sitting on a tinderbox of dry vegetation. Climate change exacerbates the issue.
But none of that explains how one of America’s great cities—the biggest in the fifth-largest economy in the world—is burning to the ground. The failure here, at heart, is an entirely human one.
California loves to spend, increasingly moving toward a model of governance where good money constantly chases after bad. Newsom has spent some $22 billion to combat homelessness since he took office and yet, there has been a 3 percent increase in homelessness in the last year. Newsom also made California the first state to have its Medicaid program cover illegal immigrants. This blatant sop to progressive activists is now expected to cost Californians $6.5 billion a year.
Finally, as Glenn warned in August of 2020, when “defund the police” fever was in full bloom in David Brooks’ latte towns across America, “the breakdown of law and order won’t go as [leftists] hope. Ultimately, the police are there to protect criminals from the populace, not the other way around. Get rid of the police, and armed vigilantism is what you’ll get. And what you’ll deserve.”
Especially if this is the same man, given that there’s a yellow blowtorch is visible in both tweets: