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ACCORDING TO LIZ - Bass served Crowley up as sacrifice for the recent Los Angeles fires after years of mayors and City Councilmembers refusing to adequately fund the department, leaving it shockingly short of both manpower and equipment.
I have always been impressed by the quality and commitment of Fire Department personnel at every level, whether dispatching paramedics from a local station for a wellness check on a friend I couldn’t reach to their heroism in fighting fires to the extraordinary leadership and big picture understanding of the City’s needs which came out clearly in Budget Advocate meetings with key personnel over the years including former LAFD Chief Kristin Crowley.
If any individuals are at fault for the devastation the wildfires wrought, it is Eric Garcetti and Karen Bass for not doubling down on those needs and the revolving City Councilmembers who were so busy trying to fund their pet projects that they forgot their primary duty was to the safety of Angelenos – residents, pets and possessions, and their counterparts at the County, State and Federal levels.
The Budget Advocates have continually excoriated Mayors and City Council about the underfunding of both the Emergency Management and Fire Departments.
For the latter, the City – in writing and in person to the mayors – time and again was recommended to:
- Fund a minimum of four trainings a year to match attrition rates [not having those cohorts available cost the City dearly]
- Fund needed protective gear, EMS equipment, firefighting material that wears out [this lack directly contributed to lives lost and delays in fighting the recent fires]
- Fund technology and hardware necessary for data tracking and expanded telecommuting [the improved efficiencies would have paid for the cost in January alone]
- Require the Fire Department to reassess its reliance on overtime [reduced hours paid at premium rates would have helped fund the additional bodies needed to fight the wildfires as well as increasing quality of life, general morale, and avoiding the inevitable mistakes/accidents incurred through overwork]
The dangers of too much overtime, not to the City budget but to the lives of the men and women protecting us and their lack of equipment so they could live to fight another day was a critical factor in Crowley pulling back the troops for which she was excoriated by Bass.
Crowley correctly called the City out for inadequately funding the department, which has been under-resourced for well over a decade, as a panoply of firefighter personnel praised her for standing up for urgently needed staffing and quality equipment.
Bass claimed Crowley failed to warn her about the fire risk then questioned her Fire Chief’s deployment decisions on the day the Palisades Fire began. The real debacle was there weren’t enough functioning fire trucks and equipment to deploy those 1,000 firefighters.
Crowley had berated the downtown bean-counters for diverting tax dollars to non-essential projects, pointing out that this left the City and the Fire Department vulnerable to the fires’ devastation. Had the department been adequately funded, losses of people and property might have been mitigated.
Is saying truth to power such a felony?
Other than the financial resources necessary for her department to fully function and protect people’s lives, has Crowley dictated to Bass how to do her job?
Who sounds on top of things? a politically beleaguered mayor or her highly qualified greatly respected Fire Chief?
Freddy Escobar, president of the United Firefighters of Los Angeles City, accurately accused Karen Bass of making Crowley:
“…a scapegoat to distract from the failure of the city and complete neglect of the fire department.
“We don’t have enough firefighters, not enough working rigs, broken down fire hydrants and a water supply that ran dry, but Chief Crowley is the one who gets terminated? It doesn’t make sense.
“Our rank-and-file firefighters on the ground — the ones saving lives and property in LA every single day, support Chief Crowley. They know the truth.
“At the end of the day, who do you think the public trusts more, our LAFD Firefighters or City Hall? I think we know the answer to that question.”
FEMA’s 2020 Natural Risk Index ranks Los Angeles County as having the highest risk in the nation for natural disasters. If they had one person on staff for every 40,000 residents (as is recommended and had been the norm for DC and other major metropolises), there would be 100 people in the department. At the time, the department had 11 full-time emergency managers. A dollar per Angeleno per day, half the cost of a cup of regular coffee at Starbucks, would have doubled the department’s budget.
The Emergency Management Department (EMD) needs to be rebuilt to prepare for the unknown; to ensure the majority of Angelenos can survive for one to two weeks without City services when the ‘Big One’ hits, the power grid crashes or the water system goes down, when wildfires whip through whole neighborhoods, or a 100-year flood (now almost 70 years overdue) devastates California.
- Demand the EMD be deemed an essential department given its importance in maintaining lives, infrastructure and fiscal integrity in the face of the pandemic and any future emergency
- Given that safety of Angelenos is THE most essential service that the City provides, the City must plan for worst-case scenarios by immediately underwriting all elements of the plans to be provided by the department
- Expedite filling existing vacancies
- Prioritize funding to bring staffing back to pre-pandemic levels i.e. Investing in the City’s future survival
- Fund necessary upgrades to avoid greater costs later
The primary fault of both the Fire Department and the EMD was in reading the political writing on City Hall’s wall all too well – cut, cut, cut. By not fully fighting back in those years when their budgets were being slashed, not being replenished when money did become available, and by not vociferously demanding further funds by laying out cost analyses on potential losses to justify the urgency to rebuild and upgrade.
I fought for them to do so just as I fought hard for the election of Karen Bass because Los Angeles didn’t need Rick Caruso as a mini-Musk at City Hall…
But what happens when the news cycle spins the story into something that is peripheral? A battle between two women leaders? And – hocus-pocus – disappears the real issue, the underfunding of safety?
What happens when no qualified firefighters want to work for Los Angeles anymore?
While we must continue to hope for the best, the City MUST plan for the worst. And the worst is yet to come.
Even if they pat themselves on the back by increasing funding for both this year (from where, Jack Humphreville is sure to ask?), it will be too little, too late, half-baked and designed to fail…
Come on. Prove me wrong!
(Liz Amsden resides in Vermont and is a regular contributor to CityWatch on issues that she is passionate about. She can be reached at [email protected].)
