Do you think that blog title is some kind of a sick joke? If so, I don’t blame you. The absurdity level is almost beyond imagination.
But it seems to be true.
From Josh Boswell’s article for London’s Daily Mail:
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.
‘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.
‘It comes from top brass downtown, City Hall.
‘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 any more. We’re doing everything we can to save money.
‘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 any more 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.
‘We’re already shy 200 paramedics, and we’re on the verge of another 200 quitting because we can’t do this any more.
‘If we don’t work overtime, they suspend and threaten to terminate us. It’s untenable.’
Dear God.
If Mayor karen bass is not unseated at the earliest possible time (a recall would be entirely appropriate), the people of Los Angeles, just like her, are beyond hope.
