Posted on 05/26/2026 5:22:02 AM PDT by Libloather
Los Angeles firefighters have broken ranks to tear into Mayor Karen Bass over the disastrous state of the department across the city.
Officers revealed to the California Post they are trapped in marathon shifts, missing paychecks and going through hell while its budget flatlines despite rising risks of wildfires.
They warned response times are climbing and emergency callouts are exploding but City Hall was refusing to pump in desperately needed cash.
Fire crews are now pooling together more than $1 million of their own cash to push for a sales tax measure they claim would cover just the basics to keep the department running.
Rich Ramirez, vice president of UFLAC Local 112 and a firefighter paramedic, told The Post: “We don’t have relief. We can’t just shut something down and tell residents no one is coming. So you stay.
“You can go from doing CPR on a child to a traffic crash, cutting someone out of a car, then straight to a drowning. That all happens in a single 24-hour shift.”
Firefighters describe 48-hour tours that spiral longer, with mandated overtime keeping some on duty up to 120 hours in high-intensity conditions.
Doug Coates, president of UFLAC Local 112 and a firefighter engineer, continued: “You think you’re going home, and they tell you you’re staying. You miss birthdays, you miss your family.”
Even as overtime piles up, some firefighters say they are still fighting just to be paid, with missed checks and delayed wages adding up to hundreds of thousands of dollars for crew members.
“We’ve filed grievances, gone to arbitration, and now we’re in lawsuits,” Ramirez said. “People are owed thousands of dollars. This is regular pay.”
(Excerpt) Read more at nypost.com ...
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I live in Kern County. County firefighters work 2 days on, 2 days off, 2 days on, 2 days off, 2 days on, 8 days off. We have guys that live in LA that work here.
More lesbo DIE chiefs at a mere seven hundred grand each per year. What a deal.
By design.
When i left they weren’t allowing more than a 48 hour shift without a day off. Not sure how the Alarm Office or Chiefs did it. I can see working 8 shifts at Crash Fire Rescue or even another slow station but definitely see a saftey issue at a busy station. 2 or 3 structure fires and maybe a prolonged incident and the physical toll would certainly impair even those in the best shape.
Did their union support Bass?
“The Los Angeles firefighters union (UFLAC Local 112) is currently not endorsing any specific mayoral candidate in the 2026 election, as its leadership is engaged in a public legal and political conflict with incumbent Mayor Karen Bass.”
Do they really believe they’ll ever see any of that money raised from the sales tax?
“Yeah, let’s tax the people of CA more to fix the problems created by the politicians and bureaucrats.”
To be clear, nobody outside of Los Angeles would be taxed more, unless they made a purchase there. This would not be state wide.
We ran mostly EMS. We worked a little over one working structure fire a month.
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