BREAKING: Mayor Karen Bass demanded LA fire dept cut $49 million LAST WEEK: report

Just last week, Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass was reportedly demanding that the LA fire department cut another $49 million from its budget right before the fires struck this week.  

According to the Daily Mail, the extra cuts would have shut down 16 fire stations as well as hampered the department's ability to fight the recent wildfires. The outlet obtained a memo that was leaked about the cuts and dated January 6. The Mail reported that the memo was sent from the LAFD "top brass" to division chiefs after Bass met with Chief Kristin Crowley in a tense meeting the Friday before.

The outlet reported that during the Friday meeting is when Bass made the demand for the extra budget cuts. 

“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 memo stated. '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," the memo added. 

The extra $49 million would have been in addition to the $17.6 million in cuts that were previously reported. After the original cut was signed off on, Los Angeles Fire Chief said that it "severely limited the department's capacity to prepare for, train for, and respond to large-scale emergencies, including wildfires." 

One veteran LAFD employee told reporters, “They did not want this out. It's an internal memo not to be distributed.” 

“It comes from top brass downtown, City Hall,” the employee added. “They're trying to allocate more money for the homeless, and they need to start taking from everybody. But we already exhausted our budget. It's already tapped. That's why they cut the fire academy in half, so they could save more money."

"That's why we're not testing if hydrants work anymore. We're doing everything we can to save money," the employee continued. "We have fire engines we can't get parts for. When one breaks down we strip it of parts to put on other fire engines because we can't buy anymore parts. If you shut down 16 stations, that's about 750 personnel. Then they expect us to take the same call volume. And yesterday we did 3,800 calls, almost twice of what our daily call volume usually is."