A month before fires, L.A. fire chief warned budget cuts were hampering emergency response

Before wildfires broke out across Los Angeles, the city’s fire chief said that budget cuts were hampering the department’s ability to respond to emergencies, a department memo shows. 

Funding for the city’s fire department decreased by $17.6 million, or 2%, between the 2024-25 fiscal year and the 2023-24 fiscal year, according to city budget documents. However, the city council in November approved a four-year $203 million contract with the firefighter’s union to help boost wages and health benefits for staff, drawing from the budget’s general fund.

The budget cuts drew criticism as firefighters scrambled to contain the ongoing fires.

In a Dec. 4 memo, LAFD Fire Chief Kristin Crowley wrote to the Board of Fire Commissioners that the budget cuts “have adversely affected the Department’s ability to maintain core operations.” 

Crowley said that a $7 million reduction in overtime hours “severely limited the Department’s capacity to prepare for, train for, and respond to large-scale emergencies” and affected their capacity for brush clearance inspections and residential inspections.

The cuts, Crowley wrote in a memo from July 2024, resulted from eliminating 58 positions, adjusting sworn salary accounts, and removing one-time expenses. Some have pointed to the one-time expenses, such as the purchase of new breathing equipment for firefighters, a one reason why there may have been a reduction in the current fiscal year’s budget compared to the year before.

When asked about the budget cuts at Thursday morning’s press conference, Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass said they did not impact the department’s ability to handle the ongoing fires. 

“There were no reductions that were made that would have impacted the situation that we were dealing with over the last couple of days,” she said. She also emphasized the additional funds the department was set to receive from the city’s contract with the union. “The unprecedented wind storm, wind at such ferocity that we haven’t seen in years, is the context in which we were dealing with this.” 

Crowley and the Board of Fire Commissioner’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment. At the board’s Dec. 17 meeting, its president Genethia Hudley-Hayes acknowledged the funding and staffing issues. 

“It is not unfair to say that we are in crisis mode within the Los Angeles Fire Department,” Hudley-Hayes said. “Anybody who knows a council person really and truly needs to be either going to city council, talking to their council person, talking in their neighborhood councils, doing whatever they need to do because we really are at a crisis point.”

The fire department overspent by an estimated $66.6 million in the 2023-24 fiscal year, this year’s budget shows, with unbudgeted contracts, unused sick time and overtime accounting for much of the overspending.

In a statement when the budget was approved, Bass said the city budget acted as a “reset.” 

“This budget serves as a reset, in part by continuing to hire for critical positions including police officers and firefighters while eliminating some of the department’s vacant positions, thereby prioritizing our City family over empty desks,” Bass said.

While the fire department’s budget was cut, the police department’s budget increased by $125.9 million, a roughly 7% increase.

There are 28 fire departments in Los Angeles County in addition to the city’s fire department. All are responding to the ongoing fires, along with firefighters from five additional states. Gov. Gavin Newsom activated California National Guard members to help battle the blazes, and the Defense Department has also offered equipment and manpower to fight the fires.

Alexander Hunter

contributed to this report.

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Julia Ingram is a data journalist for CBS News Confirmed. She uses data analysis and computation to cover misinformation, AI and social media.

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