Less than 12 hours after a massive fire began ripping through the Pacific Palisades on Tuesday, the Los Angeles Fire Department made a rare request. All LAFD firefighters, including those off-duty, were asked to phone in their availability. Stoked by high winds, the blaze was growing quickly, and the LAFD was already fighting a losing battle. Such a summons hadn’t been issued in nearly two decades.
As of January 8, the Palisades Fire is 0 percent contained. Two additional wildfires, the Hurst Fire and the Eaton Fire, are also currently at zero containment as they scorch greater Los Angeles County, burning thousands of acres, destroying over 1,100 structures, and killing at least five people. As hundreds of firefighters race to stop the spread, gusting Santa Ana winds and a landscape desiccated by a bone-dry winter — an anomaly linked to broader climate change trends — aren’t the only obstacles the LAFD is facing.
The LAFD makes up about 6 percent of the city’s expense budget; the LAPD receives 15 percent.
In June, Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass signed an adopted $12.8 billion budget that cut the fire department’s funding by more than $17.5 million, or around 2 percent of the previous year’s budget of $837 million. It was the second-largest departmental operating cut to come out of the city’s 2024-25 fiscal year budget, which shaved funding from the majority of city departments — but not the police. The Los Angeles Police Department received a funding bump of nearly $126 million. The LAFD makes up about 6 percent of the city’s expense budget; the LAPD receives 15 percent of the funds.
“What is currently happening and unfolding is what we have been warning about,” said Ricci Sergienko, a lawyer and organizer with People’s City Council LA. “The consistent defunding of other city programs in order to give the LAPD billions a year has consequences, and these elected officials do actually have blood on their hands. The city is unprepared to handle this fire, and Los Angeles shouldn’t be in that position.”
Other departments that received major cuts included the Bureau of Street Services, the Bureau of Sanitation, and General Services, for an overall budget decrease of nearly $250 million. Funds for rental support, homelessness services, and street lighting were also reduced.
Only three city councilmembers — Hugo Soto-Martínez, Nithya Raman, and Eunisses Hernandez — voted against the budget last May, noting in a press release that it allocated tens of millions of dollars to fund LAPD positions that would likely remain vacant. That’s because the LAPD has struggled to recruit officers in recent years, even as it continues to request and receive funding for those empty positions.
An LAPD spokesperson reached by The Intercept said that they could not respond to questions by the time of publication.
The controversial cuts were ostensibly made to help close the city’s budget deficit. Critics, however, have noted that defunding the fire department is a recipe for disaster as the climate crisis brings increasingly devastating fires to the drought-stricken region. While it’s unclear that any amount of staffing could have fully contained the fires raging across Los Angeles this week, the call for help — and the firefighters traveling in to assist from across California and nearby states — shows that any additional capacity could have been useful.
A spokesperson for Los Angeles’s chief auditor, City Controller Kenneth Mejia, said that the most recent LAFD budget cuts included a reduction in sworn payroll, reduced funds for operating supplies, and cuts to 58 positions. In December, the Board of Fire Commissioners sent a report to Bass and the City Council outlining how the funding cuts had adversely impacted the department’s crucial services.
“The Los Angeles City Fire Department (LAFD) is facing unprecedented operational challenges due to the elimination of critical civilian positions and a $7 million reduction in Overtime Variable Staffing Hours,” wrote Fire Chief Kristin Crowley. “These budgetary reductions have adversely affected the Department’s ability to maintain core operations, such as technology and communication infrastructure, payroll processing, training, fire prevention, and community education.”
The LAFD’s Fire Prevention Bureau, for instance, had six of its roles cut and its overtime hours reduced. Crowley wrote that the decrease in overtime hours created an “inability to complete required brush clearance inspections, which are crucial for mitigating fire risks in high-hazard areas.”
While most departments received cuts, LAPD’s budget continues to bloat, and Mejia has pointed to overspending on police liability claims as one major source of the city’s deficit. The city spent more than double its annual liability payouts budget in the first six months of this fiscal year, with the LAPD leading the spending at more than $100 million in legal settlements. Recent payouts include a $17.7 million settlement with the family of a mentally disabled man who was fatally shot by an off-duty officer inside a Costco, and a $11.8 million payout to a man who sustained a traumatic brain injury in a car accident when an LAPD detective ran a red light.
Diana Chang, Mejia’s communications director, highlighted two forces that are driving a rise in liability payouts, most of which are made from the city’s General Fund rather than department-specific appropriations. Departments are either “not held accountable for liabilities they give rise to,” Chang wrote, or they are “underfunded / understaffed and cannot keep up with the necessary demands and needs of the City.”
“We just give more money to the police, who then end up costing us more money, due to all of these settlements. It’s a never-ending loop.”
Sergienko, of People’s City Council LA, bristled at the use of taxpayer money to fund police abuse settlements. “We’re paying for state-sanctioned violence instead of having money to deal with the climate crisis,” he said. “We just give more money to the police, who then end up costing us more money, due to all of these settlements. It’s a never-ending loop.”
Looking ahead, the LAPD has already requested another increase for the 2025-26 fiscal year. In November, the LA Board of Police Commissioners approved a spending package that included a request for an additional $160.5 million from the city’s budget — an increase of more than 8 percent. Bass is currently reviewing the proposal; she’s expected to unveil the city’s next budget plan in late April.
Bass’s office, which did not immediately respond to a request for comment, has publicly clashed with Mejia over his criticism of the city budget. Last spring, after Mejia called the deductions to public services “short-sighted,” Bass spokesperson Zach Seidl dismissed the remarks as “theatrical exaggeration and doomsday projections.”
For many Angelenos, that doomsday is now here. The fires burning across the county are already the most destructive in modern LA history, forcing more than 80,000 evacuations with no signs of abating. Whole blocks in the Palisades are leveled. The Eaton fire is eating its way through Altadena, Pasadena and the surrounding communities, taking at least five lives so far.
Los Angeles is no stranger to wildfires, but a January disaster is unusual. Studies show that climate change is contributing to longer, more destructive fire seasons. Still, in 2020, LA’s then-Mayor Eric Garcetti cut another $500,000 in funds set aside for a Climate Emergency Mobilization Office.
“The impact of this catastrophic event will be felt by our community well past today, but we hope that our City’s coordinated efforts will provide assistance to ensure the smoothest recovery possible,” Chang wrote in a statement. “As always, we support putting resources and meaningful investments toward saving lives through emergency preparedness, wildfire prevention, and serious climate action, and encourage the City’s decisionmakers to prioritize these resources and investments.”
