I cringed earlier this month when the Los Angeles mayor was criticized for cutting about $17.5 million this fiscal year from the city’s fire department.
While there are some details to that cut, the bottom line as we all know is that when cities face challenging fiscal landscapes they only have limited areas where money can be cut—and as we have seen in Davis, there are nuances to fire staffing that are controversial and also costly.
As Mayor Bass put it, “I think it’s most important to understand that we were in tough budgetary times. Everybody knew that, but that the impact of our budget really did not impact what we’ve been going through over the last few days.”
What critics, who want to apparently nail the LA mayor to the cross over this, fail to understand—they are about to make it much harder for other communities to balance their budget and public safety.
For example—San Jose and Oakland.
The Mercury News reported earlier this week, “The devastating fires that continue to burn in Los Angeles and rank among California’s deadliest and most destructive in history exposed long-festering complaints that the city fire department’s staffing is well below national averages.”
The Mercury News adds that “in the Bay Area, two of the three largest city fire departments are similarly stretched, raising questions about their ability to protect homes and residents from wind-driven infernos like the Palisades and Eaton fires that continue to burn in and around Los Angeles…”
According to the latest 2022 profile report from the National Fire Protection Association, a nonprofit organization based in Massachusetts that focuses on fire safety, fire departments across the nation that are primarily or entirely staffed by full-time employees have seen a range of 1.54 to 1.81 career firefighters for every 1,000 people. In larger departments, this number ranges from 0.84 to 1.30.
An analysis by the Bay Area News Group revealed that the Los Angeles Fire Department has a staffing rate of 0.90 firefighters for every 1,000 residents. In comparison, the Oakland Fire Department has a rate of 1.07, while the San Jose Fire Department’s rate is significantly lower at only 0.64.
“We have the lowest staffing number out of all metropolitan cities in the United States, and we are severely understaffed,” said Jerry May, a San Jose Fire Department fire captain and president of San Jose Firefighters Local 230 Union, representing the city’s 647 firefighters. “We’re one of the busiest in the nation for how low-staffed we are.”
Meanwhile, in Oakland, Councilmember Zac Unger has pushed back on proposals to close fire stations as a means to save money as that city battles its own budget crisis.
“We saw that Los Angeles was one of the lowest staffed fire departments in the country, and Oakland is right there with them,” Unger said. “We have desperately low staffing levels in Oakland.”
Part of the problem here— “it’s hard to say how much staffing hampered Los Angeles’ response to the devastating fires that erupted amid a perfect storm of conditions that primed the region to burn—warm, hurricane-force easterly gusts known as Santa Anas fanned flames in tinder-dry hills and grasslands parched by a prolonged dry spell.”
But that’s not going to stop critics from ripping public officials when a natural disaster happen. And, perhaps more importantly, it’s going to change any future budget debates when it comes to fire protection.
In Davis, about 15 years ago or so, we engaged in our own debates. We looked at fire staffing. We looked at compensation. We noted that most calls for service were for medical and not fires. Cut backs were highly contentious and temporary.
Critics of Measure Q last November attempted to revive some of the fire staffing and over-compensation arguments—but the arguments largely did not resonate.
As Rich Rifkin put it last fall, “the biggest financial problem for the city is within its control. Nearly all of our discretionary funds go to city employees. And since the Davis City Council dramatically increased pensions for police and fire in 2001 — and a few years later jacked up the post-retirement benefits for all other city workers — no city budget has ever controlled the growth of employee compensation.”
The problem that you end up having, from a fiscal standpoint, is the higher compensation means the more it costs per employee. Since existing employee bargaining groups are reluctant (for obvious reasons) to take pay cuts or even slow the growth of employee compensation, departments and cities that have to make their budgets balance (in some manner at least) often have to do so by cutting staff rather than compensation.
Again, I want to emphasize, most experts do not believe this mattered for Los Angeles.
As the NY Times reported: “LA was prepared for serious fires – but it wasn’t ready for four.”
“There were too many houses to protect, and not enough engines,” one fire captain in Los Angeles said.
But the NY Times added, “Though fire officials say they were well-prepared and simply overwhelmed by the elements, questions are being raised about whether the intensity of modern fires requires a new playbook.”
A new playbook without any doubt is going to be expensive—and given what we just saw, maybe justifiably so.
But people are going to have to understand that what happened in Los Angeles is going to make it much more difficult for other communities to get costs under control.
Two things not mentioned: 1. As LA was decreasing its fire dept. budget, it increased its police budget far more. Just a reminder: police solve 13.2% of California crimes (in 2022) Safety nets are cheaper and more effective at dealing with crime.
2. Thanks to financialization and private equity, fire engines themselves are produced by an oligopoly, making them far more expensive and slower to arrive at the cities that order them (see https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/did-a-private-equity-fire-truck-roll)
“Critics of Measure Q last November attempted to revive some of the fire staffing and over-compensation arguments—but the arguments largely did not resonate.”
That’s because Davis residents have become stupider and less involved.
“But people are going to have to understand that what happened in Los Angeles is going to make it much more difficult for other communities to get costs under control.”
In other words, housing in stupid places is going to get *way* more expensive — OR, we can stop building in stupid places.
“Um, did you know your sorority house is built on top of the Hayward Fault?” — Alan Miller to a friend in Berkeley, 1985, standing on her sorority houses’ balcony with a great view of the Bay, because it was built on the fault escarpment 😐 For more great land-use decisions, check out the 1970 BBC Documentary “The City That Waits to Die” [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZQgR5-pqJLc] about the SF Bay Area. All still true today, even if 55 years later the big one hasn’t hit. YET 😐 Hint: It will
“In other words, housing in stupid places is going to get *way* more expensive — OR, we can stop building in stupid places.”
There are no perfectly safe places to build houses.
“Um, did you know your sorority house is built on top of the Hayward Fault?”
Did you know there is a fault that runs between Vacaville and Winters which had a major earthquake in the 1800s?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1892_Vacaville%E2%80%93Winters_earthquakes#Damage
And, of course, the entire Sacramento Valley flooded in the Great Flood of 1862.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Flood_of_1862
Stating that there are no “perfectly safe places to build houses” diminishes the fact that some places are MUCH more-risky than others. Insurance companies and government agencies already know which places have more risk (and the source of the risk).
“Did you know there is a fault that runs between Vacaville and Winters which had a major earthquake in the 1800s?”
Why yes, I did . . . I have a BS in Geology from U.C. Davis and that might have come up a few dozen times.
I’m not talking about the fact that there is no place you can build where a meteor could not fall on your house, nor am I talking about not building houses where the ground may violently shake. I’m talking about STUPID places. When you build a sorority house, or a police station, or the UC Berkeley Stadium (true folks, Google it) on the escarpment itself, there is no earthquake architectural standard that will save your building if the ground itself separates. That’s what I mean by stupid.