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Source: Daily Mail
Date: January 10, 2025
Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass demanded her Fire Department make an extra $49million of budget cuts last week, a leaked memo revealed.
This cut is already on top of $17.6million of cuts in her latest budget.
The extra cuts, requested just days before fires broke out and devastated swathes of Los Angeles, would have shut down 16 fire stations and crippled the department's ability to respond to emergencies, sources said.
DailyMail.com interviewed current and former senior LAFD officers briefed on the shocking proposed cuts, and exclusively obtained the memo from an LA Fire Department (LAFD) whistleblower who posts on social media under the moniker 'LAFD Watchdog'.
The memo is dated January 6, only a day before the devastating Palisades Fire started.
According to the sources, it was sent from LAFD 'top brass' at City Hall to division chiefs and captains - after a fraught meeting the previous Friday between Chief Kristin Crowley and Mayor Bass.
'The LAFD is still going through a FY [financial year] 2024/2025 $48.8million budget reduction exercise with the CAO [City Attorney's Office],' the document said.
'The only way to provide a cost savings would be to close as many as 16 fire stations (not resources, fire stations); this equates to at least one fire station per City Council District.
'The details of this plan have not yet been developed. This is a worst-case scenario and is NOT happening yet.'
Now more than 54-square-miles are scorched in at least five separate fires, more than 4,000 homes and buildings destroyed, ten dead and more injured.
And the billionaire and celebrity-inhabited neighborhood of Pacific Palisades was almost completely wiped off the map.
But some senior firefighters' blood was already boiling when they received the note from their bosses about proposed budget slashes.
'They did not want this out. It's an internal memo not to be distributed,' one currently-serving 25-year veteran of the Fire Department told DailyMail.com.