Posted on 01/16/2025 4:00:05 AM PST by TigerClaws
CNN's Kyung Lah speaks with firefighters in California who have been sounding the alarm about staffing shortages as the state grapples with a major fire disaster.
What's the budget again? $830 million per year for the LAFD.
Took 45 minutes for them to arrive after the first 911 call in the Palisades fire.
They'll ask for ... more taxes.
Time for the fire victims to protect their flaming Smurf politicians from first responder allegations.
Have you seen the DEI Dopes in charge.
The place is a insane asylum .
Truly despicable is..... she and Newson treating the devastation as if they had nothing
to do with it. Its just a “problem” they will show off their political “skills” to solve.
Figuring they’ll be reelected.
Outrageous.
My friends at Cal Fire have been sounding alarms for 10 years.
“Too much fuel and no way to remove it”
Response: “Cut your budget”
Question: If a tree falls in the forest does it make a sound?
Tell me there’s no similarity.
Yup. At first I felt bad for these people but as it all unravels its clear its not climate change or bad luck that allowed this to become what it is…. Its the people who vote for the people who choose political posturing over public safety that are to blame. These same folks who lost everything should be outraged but act as if mother nature got them because of carbon emissions…. So nothing will change. An endangered shrub has more priority than a human life in Cali….
The pertinent question is......
When the tree next door explodes, will your house burn too?
The real question is: can a massive civilization live is a desert?
Bass says she is a Marxist but she gets paid a high end capitalist salary....
As of 2023, the Los Angeles Mayor earned a salary of $304,434.
All financed by taxpayers, rich govt Salaries could include
<><>bonuses, stipends, honorariums, gratuities
<><>incentive pay
<><>expense and charge accounts,
<><>discounted gift cards,
<><>paid transportation,
<><>housing allowance,
<><>Cadillac healthcare, life insurance,
<><>dental and vision insurance,
<><>paid sick days,
<><>paid time off
<><>paid vacation time
<><>paid holidays
<><>paid student tuition
<><>401(k) employer contributions
<><>startup pensions,
<><>retirement plans with city-paid rollovers, IRA transfer
Exactly the way I see it. The “Letters to the Editors” crowd are out their defending the dumbasses they elected and are trying to blame Charcoal California on everything and everybody else except those politicians responsible for it.
Who wants to work for woke bosses?
That’s part of the plan.
Take over HR or win that political office.
DEI ‘training” and anyone who complains is booted.
Every hire is DEI. (Only 6% of hires by the S&P 500 were of white males post George Flloyd - St. Floyd of Fentanyl - riots).
LAFD fired the firemen who didn’t want the COVID shot (”My body my choice”? Nope!)
Adam Carolla said back in the 1990s he was told the wait for a white male to even take the text to work for LAFD was seven years. How long is it now?
Lunacy.
Boeing has planes falling out of fhe sky. LAFD can’t get to a fire promptly.
Every school, business, government organization, church — ALL of them are at risk of self-destruction by Marxism.
But the Cultural Marxist plan -seeing how resilient capitalism is - destroy all of the pillars that support the society and collapse it. “Top down; bottom up.”
Then remake it as Los Angeles 2.0 - utopian society.
Of course, it’s an easy way to conquer and destroy a society without firing a shot.
USS Bonhomme Richard burning up dockside in San Diego, was the alarm.
This is the “Destruction” Phase of “Build Back Better”.
Once things are “built back”, normalcy will more or less return.
They could not afford the FD since they were overspending on illegal aliens.
HOW MANY MECHANICS ARE WORKING ON FIRE EQUIPMENT???
OVERHEAD PIC OF TRUCKS IN MAINTENANCE YARD IS DISTRESSING
THERE ARE FAR TOO MANY OUT OF SERVICE.....
Bass says she is a Marxist but she gets paid a high end capitalist salary....
As of 2023, the Los Angeles Mayor earned a salary of $304,434.
All financed by taxpayers, rich govt Salaries could include
<><>bonuses, stipends, honorariums, gratuities
<><>incentive pay
<><>expense and charge accounts,
<><>discounted gift cards,
<><>paid transportation,
<><>housing allowance,
<><>Cadillac healthcare, life insurance,
<><>dental and vision insurance,
<><>paid sick days,
<><>paid time off
<><>paid vacation time
<><>paid holidays
<><>paid student tuition
<><>401(k) employer contributions
<><>startup pensions,
<><>retirement plans with city-paid rollovers, IRA transfer
LA’s Total Leadership Failure
The city slashed fire and other basic services after Mayor Karen Bass awarded fat contracts to government workers.
City Journal/ Eye on the News / Jan 10 2025
The devastating wildfires in Los Angeles have spotlighted questionable state and local government policies in California that may have contributed to the blazes and left areas like Hollywood vulnerable due to insufficient firefighting resources. Mayor Karen Bass’s budget cuts to the city’s fire department, enacted just months ago amid warnings about the city’s deteriorating finances, stand out as a striking example of misplaced priorities. The cuts stemmed from a budget crisis triggered by her administration’s decision to reward city employees with rich contracts and benefits—even as it dismissed worries that the reductions would hurt services. “Predictions that city services will be impossible to deliver,” deputy mayor Zach Seidl told the press, “are simply false.” Few public statements have aged as poorly—or as hauntingly—as this one.
Bass took office in December 2022 after a surprisingly close race against real estate developer Rick Caruso, a Republican who had switched to the Democratic Party. A Los Angeles Times poll showed that Caruso did well among voters viewing the economy and public safety as key issues; Bass dominated among voters who prioritized climate change and “coalition building.” Shortly after taking office, Bass began negotiating with public sector unions over expiring contracts. Early last year, those talks resulted in more than two dozen agreements with unions representing the city’s civilian employees, guaranteeing wage hikes of between 20 percent and 25 percent over five years. The contracts raised the minimum wage for city employees from $20 to $25 per hour and also contained rich benefits, including allowing workers to cash in 100 percent of their unused sick time when they retire—an increasingly rare perk in the private sector. An analysis by the city’s administrative officer said the deal would cost Los Angeles $3.5 billion over the life of the contracts. A similar multiyear deal with police unions was projected to add another $1 billion to costs.
The new contracts were the largest, in percentage terms, given to city employees since 2007, when then-mayor Antonio Villaraigosa delivered pay raises amounting to 25 percent over five years. Coming just before the 2008 Wall Street crisis crashed the economy, those contracts helped to blow a huge hole in Los Angeles’s budget—leading to the elimination of thousands of jobs and shrinking investment in basic services. Critics warned that something similar might occur following the 2024 contracts, which could drain the city’s fiscal reserves.
It took just months for those fears to materialize. This time it wasn’t a Wall Street meltdown that busted the budget but a series of unanticipated expenses related to judgments against the city in personal-injury negligence cases arising from dangerous conditions, such as broken sidewalks and inadequate streetlighting, as well as judgments against the police. Under normal circumstances, Los Angeles should have been able to absorb those costs, but its reserves had dropped below acceptable levels, and paying the liability cases without additional revenues or budget cuts would have been enough to force the city council to declare a fiscal emergency. In response, Bass cut the city’s budget to $12.9 billion, down from $13.1 billion the previous year. This involved making reductions in some 20 areas, including a cut of $17.6 million in the fire department—the steepest decline in any area except street services, where Bass reduced spending by $21 million.
“The city is living beyond its means,” the editorial board of the Los Angeles Times noted at the time, adding that the problem was “self-inflicted.” For Angelenos hoping the city would invest in infrastructure—“smoothing busted sidewalks, fixing burned-out streetlights, trimming trees, or any other public improvements”—those hopes seemed unlikely to be realized. Critics also faulted the administration for how it handled union negotiations that led to the budget-busting contracts. Most of the talks were conducted in secret, with little public discussion of the costly perks included in the agreements until they were finalized.
California’s latest bout of horrific fires will reopen debate about the state government’s failures to address a deadly problem. California’s decades-long resistance to boosting its water-storage capacity—what Victor Davis Hanson has described as “the scorching of California”—will face new scrutiny. The state’s land-management practices, which incoming President Trump has already criticized, will provoke more controversy. Los Angeles’s water-management system, lambasted by former mayoral candidate Caruso—formerly a commissioner of the city’s Department of Water and Power—for running dry in some neighborhoods during the current fires, will require new investment. Questions will linger, too, over how much difference the $17.6 million cut by Mayor Bass from the city’s fire department might have made.
What is beyond dispute is that Los Angeles and the surrounding area have a long history of wildfires, including in recent years. That threat didn’t seem to be much of a priority in Karen Bass’s budget.
Steven Malanga is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and City Journal’s senior editor.
Truly despicable is..... Bass and Newson treating
the devastation as if they had nothing to do with it.
Its just a “problem” they will show off their political “skills” to solve.
Figuring they’ll be reelected.
Outrageous.
IMAGERY 2025 (see Google Maps link below)
LAFD Bureau of Supply and Maintenance
140 N Ave 19, Los Angeles, CA
<><><>
I counted 24 fire trucks outside the south end of the maintenance building. Are they awaiting repair or are they parts-vehicles that will be cannibalized? I imagine for trade-in value they would be more valuable intact.
No way of knowing how many vehicles are inside and under repair.
On the opposite end of the facility is the storage area of about 35 ambulances and or rescue vehicles.
Is this an average number of vehicles off line, for a city this size?
57 vehicles or apparatus outside... for argument’s sake, calculate another 57 apparatus inside = 114. Ironically, that is how many stations the LAFD has in their sphere of operations.
Hard to say what number of vehicles are working inventory, and what number are down with an issue?
Obviously, there needs to be a back up inventory to replace units that go down on the front lines from time to time, or are required to be brought in for overnight maintenance, or longer.
<><><> freepersup
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Los_Angeles_Fire_Department
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