I'm not sure why the percentage matters? Whether it's 2% or 20%, it's still millions of dollars that could have been used here. More broadly, why are we cutting fire department budgets when wildfires are becoming more frequent, more intense and a year round phenomenon due to global warming? If you want to trim fat in the government there are much bigger targets to go after than an essential service like firefighting.
It doesn't seem to me that the GP comment is arguing for the cut in funding, but rather that 'gutted' may reasonably imply to many readers that a relatively significant portion of the budget was cut, which would be misleading in this case even if unintentional. The percentage helps put the number into context as at least I would not have an intuitive sense of expected or historical LAFD budget numbers.
(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?
"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.
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.
> totalling almost $2 billion. The LAPD's budget for one fiscal year is larger than most country's GDPs
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.
How much of the city budget does the LAPD need for crime to finally go down then? 60%? 80%? Maybe all of it, replace the mayor with the police commissioner and run the city like a quasi-military dictatorship?
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.
A smartass could say that national, state, and local legislatures could eliminate crime with a stroke of the pen - no money required. Just eliminate laws.
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.
> 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.
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.
Judging by the history of the Los Angeles Police Department and their own gangs, run by members of the department, policemen, getting rid of cops might actually help reduce crime!
"...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....
The question is whether quality of life can be improved in the city with a better allocation of the $2 billion dollars.
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.
My idea is to have [optional] speed limiters. The generalized speed limits are very crude. Setting different speed for [small] parts of roads using signs has its limits. We attempt to fix dangerous spots by design, it is a wonderful art but not perfect. You can probably solve a lot of congestion by raising the maximum speed where it makes sense. It also allows for limited control over how many cars try to uses the same road. Traffic jams become bugs. It can log your speed on different roads, if there is a violation it can be treated like a bug too rather than a violation. If you don't have a limiter you can still move along with traffic. If there is a mark on the license plate it is not going to fast.
Drastically cutting the police budget is almost certainly a good idea. The problem is that you can't just count everything you take from the police budget as extra money because even though the police aren't able to competently do a lot of the work they are currently being utilized for somebody still needs to do that work and they also have to be paid. At least initially it would require an investment to get a better agency to start handling that stuff.
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.
For $2B you could save a lot of lives even through the overpriced medical system. With a number this big, whatever you do with $2B has to be way better than saving those lives.
no. not really. The spread of the viewline fire was contained, the getty villa was saved, the hurst fire is being contained and they were on the sunset one pretty quickly. There was one in culver city and woodley that they quashed quickly as well. They got the divide fire from igniting angeles national forest and the lidia. The royal fire is about where the 2018 fire was and that was taken down as well today as was the sunswept, freddy, and emma fire.
that's the past 24 hours.
If you've been following this, they've done a fairly amazing job at knocking out maybe a dozen fires in the past day. 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.
On the contrary, with crime, there's things like the 1992 Watts truce, which is credited with a rapid decline in LA street violence, which happened without law enforcement at all.
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.
