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Comment by segasaturn | Hacker News Reader

Los Angeles Fire Department funding was cut by over $23M only a few months ago. The fires are currently being fought by a skeleton crew of remaining fire fighters and volunteers. Can't say if that funding would have prevented it, but cutting it definitely has not helped.

Source: https://www.politico.com/news/2025/01/08/los-angeles-fires-m...

Edit: Changing a word, "gutted" -> "cut"

View on HN

Someone tweeted $23 million .. your linked article (thank you for source) follows that with:

  City budget documents show the department’s more than $800 million budget decreased by around $17 million compared to the previous budget cycle.

Which makes the cuts less than %2.12

"Gutted" as a descripter seems extreme and the details that matter are whether these reductions simply trimmed fat, or denied something essential that would have made all the difference here.

The problem with that though is that the overall budget includes big ticket items like pensions and overtime. And cuts often directly are from live services. So even though it’s 2% of the overall budget, the cut could still be significant to the availability of firefighters and crucial things like response times.

I recommend to everyone to get out of cities and counties that have large pension liabilities. You will be less safe, your kids will be educated more poorly, and your quality of public services will be whittled away because the money is going to retirees and debt.

E.g. Retirement benefits and debt service took up 43% of Chicago’s budget in 2022: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/30/opinion/chicago-illinois-.... A decade ago my wife and I decided to abandon our efforts to move back to the city (where we went to law school) because we saw this coming.

And go where exactly? To towns that don't even have the tax base to support themselves and lack jobs?

It's not like suburbs aren't sitting on financial bombs either.

https://www.usnews.com/news/best-states/rankings/fiscal-stab...

I moved to unincorporated exurban Maryland. The state government is a mess, but it’s mostly preoccupied dealing with Baltimore. Our county is great. Good schools with modest per student spending, the friendliest police I’ve ever interacted with. Even our county landfill is one of the cleanest and most orderly facilities I’ve ever seen. Nicer than most of New York City for sure.

I'd imagine that a lot of the people reading this work in tech, where pretty much every company has instituted return-to-office mandates.

And of course, even if you were willing to spend several hours a day commuting, if you're in California exurban areas aren't exactly safer from wildfires.

That is unfortunate for them. But let me tell you how amazing our landfill is. To me, it exemplifies the best of America. It’s so clean and organized, run by orderly, polite, and helpful people. Every time I have to throw out some bulky items, the experience gives me confidence in our local government. My parents, who grew up in Bangladesh, are also amazed by it. Our local county clerk’s office is amazing too. I needed to get one of my kid’s birth certificates reprinted. I went down the street, to the basement of some sober and cost-effective building that was built in the 1980s, and had a new copy in 20 minutes.

I grew up in northern VA in the 1990s and I thought that the whole of America (besides NYC obviously) was like that. Super clean, orderly, and efficient. Then I lived in Wilmington Delaware, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and DC, and it reminded me too much of the third world.

> It's not like suburbs aren't sitting on financial bombs either.

Reminds me of a video (part of series), titled "Why American Cities Are Broke - The Growth Ponzi Scheme". Previous HN submission and discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32495647

TLDR: Suburban and certain commercial development is money-loser because tax-revenue is way under the long-term costs of the infrastructure to support it, and already denser areas (including the housing of poorer people) are subsidizing spread-out/richer zones.

This is just false, and a quick look at any municipal budget is enough to confirm it. Infrastructure costs are small fraction of spend of any municipality. It’s typically under 10%. Making infra spend twice aa efficient will only increase ability to spend by 5%, which is equivalent to two years of revenue growth. The growth Ponzi scheme people say that it’s all deferred maintenance and in long term it will collapse, but it simply has not happened anywhere, even in places where suburban development pattern has existed for three quarters of a century.

My impression has been that Strong Towns' analysis of the growth Ponzi scheme was correct, or at least not obviously incorrect, in its original context, which was watching small towns far away from large cities become hollowed out by people moving outside the city limits into unincorporated land. If you actually look at the examples on the original Strong Towns' site, you will see that they're largely not suburbs or even exurbs of major cities.

But both that site and its readers have tried to apply that conclusion to suburbs of major cities, which is ludicrously wrong to anyone that actually knows anything about the causes of municipal bankruptcy (almost always due to pension obligations , and often in a vicious cycle with high taxes raised to pay for pensions that drive away residents).

Not every city is drowning in those kinds of liabilities.

Insert Homer Simpson meme “Not every city is drowning in those kinds of liabilities, yet”

Local governance in general is FUBAR. Here in CA, housing supply policies from the legislature have gotten a lot better in recent years, but construction still gets bogged down at the local level.

Most budgeting should be moved to the state level, IMO. It's crazy for Western Springs, Atherton and Beverly Hills to waste money while Chicago and Oakland fall behind. If some magnates decide to move to Texas as a result, good riddance. The dependence on property taxes is particularly perverse, as it incentivizes the housing pyramid scheme.

Why would you want more decisions to be moved up to the state level, where officials will be elected by a low-information statewide electorate, instead of a local level, where there’s at least hope of an informed electorate that’ll hold the government accountable? That’s certainly been my experience living in a well-run county in Maryland.

This guy is my county executive: https://www.aacounty.org/pittmanandfriends. I trust him to make sure our trash gets picked up on time and to keep the community safe. I certainly don’t trust the Maryland government to do that.

It's not so much an informed electorate as a rent-seeking one.[1] The regulatory capture [2] of obscure local boards is much easier than that of state agencies. Voters who are part of a special interest group are much more aware of what and who they're voting for. The prime example are landlords and homeowners. They have managed to strangle the supply of housing to inflate prices, creating the crisis we're in now.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent-seeking

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulatory_capture

The home ownership rate in my county is 75%, so “landlords and homeowners” is the vast majority of the population, not a “special interest group.”

And your point doesn’t contradict mine. The homeowners in my county are highly informed and conscientious voters, and their decisions are good for most of the people who already live in the county.

I agree in certain circumstances, including land use, you want to make decisions at the state level. But for most government services, like education, policing, local roads, etc., I want Kim who runs our HOA to be voting on who makes those decisions and hassling those officials to keep them accountable.

It's still a special interest group, even if it happens to be a large one. It's orchestrating decisions that effectively siphon money from non-members (e.g. renters and young families), and in proportion to the number of properties each member owns no less.

In any case, we don't seem to disagree all that much. My original point was more legislative than executive in nature. Local executive accountability is desirable, provided that the budgeting and rulemaking were made uniform state-wide. Education already works that way.

Orleans Parish certainly used Katrina to dump pension liabilities but I don’t know if I feel any safer for it.

Not just cities or counties.

The entire state of New Jersey exists to pay pensions. The 2025 general budget is $55 billion, $7 billion went to funding the pension for one year, again.

i dont think i want to live in a place that will abandon me when im old. doesnt seem ideal

It appears we agree that the details of the cuts matters.

More information since my last comment, at least half the budget cuts indeed impacted large scale disaster response capabilities.

https://www.nbclosangeles.com/news/california-wildfires/la-w...

> The budget reduction, approved last year by Mayor Karen Bass, was mostly absorbed by leaving many administrative jobs unfilled, but that left about $7 million that was cut from its overtime budget that was used for training, fire prevention, and other key functions.

> The variable overtime hours, called "V-Hours" within the LAFD, were used to pay for FAA-mandated pilot training and helicopter coordination staffing for wildfire suppression, the memo said.

"Without this funding, pilot compliance and readiness are jeopardized, and aerial firefighting capabilities are diminished," it said. "Changes to the Air Operations Section impact the Department's ability to adhere to current automatic and mutual aid agreements, provide air ambulance service, and quickly respond to woodland fires with water dropping helicopters."

> The memo also highlighted other programs that would suffer under the cuts, including the Disaster Response Section, which funds the bulldozer teams that cut breaks and control lines around wildfires, and the Critical Incident Planning and Training Section, which develops plans for major emergencies.

I have a serious interest in emergency service budgets (in Western Australia, although personnel from here do travel to California to assist in our off season).

So.. cheers for the update and context, that does highlight a 'loss' of $7 million in training alocation from an over 800 million budget.

Do 'we' hold the state of California responsible here for allocating less overall, or the LA Fire Chief for perhaps not making the best use of what was allocated to them.

I'm an outsider and I'm avoiding throwing shade, just highlighting the complexity of budget issues.

If the blame goes to the state then attention should be paid to the page 6 water flow from revenue to expenditures - if Fire needs more then Police(?) must get less .. etc.

Cali Budget: https://cao.lacity.gov/budget/summary/2024-25%20Budget%20Sum...

(page 11) $774 million went to salaries, $46 million to expenses.

The blame starts with the mayor and top brass of the city government. The literal job description involves running the city based on money they have, including prioritizing what’s important. Fire departments and emergency services are the last departments that need budget cuts. Obviously some blame does also fall on the fire chief, but fire departments are usually well run and from the looks of it, there seems to have been an effort to absorb most of the cost cutting in vacant admin positions. Whether there was an opportunity to make cuts elsewhere from the FD’s pov, we’d need to look at the data more closely.

> The literal job description involves running the city based on money they have, including prioritizing what’s important.

Sure, and to that end the Police and Fire together make up in excess of 60% of the entire budget.

Should all income go to the Fire Dept? (Obviously not) .. again, I'm an outsider, but from a helicopter perspective there already a good sized portion of the budget going towards Fire as a priority already. Should some of the Police budget be cut and redirected?

One a portion of total available has been allocated it does rather fall to the Fire Chief to make the most of what has been granted.

The challenge appears to be how to make what's available go the furtherest.

Here, not California, we make considerable use of volunteers .. well equiped and large well trained volunteers with solid liability insurance should they toast themselves and backed by a professional full time core.

I dare say similar things happen in California, I note the use of the prison population in fire fighting.

It's a tough problem domain, not helped by all the outside hot takes on twitter and elsewhere that casually claim budgets are being gutted, etc.

> Sure, and to that end the Police and Fire together make up in excess of 60% of the entire budget.

Of the LA City Fiscal Year 2025 (July 1, 2024 - June 30, 2025) of $12.90 billion, $1.98 billion (15.36%) is Police and $820 million (6.36%) is Fire. Combined, this is less than 22%, not in excess of 60%.

https://openbudget.lacity.org/#!/year/2025/operating/0/depar...

>Should some of the Police budget be cut and redirected?

I'm as far from this situation as you can be, but yes, absolutely, it's ridiculous how much money is set on fire on ineffective budget items, while at the same time AFAIU the police force is not really held responsible to do its job.

Agree with everything you have said in this thread, just want to also draw attention to the fact that there are 2400 fewer firefighters in California because California has rightfully reduced the amount of inmate firefighters. I don't know whether they were counted on for these emergency situations.

https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2024-07-09/californ...

I seriously hope the rural WA fire season this year doesn't match California or we're going to be for lack of a better word fucked.

We just had a record dry year followed by a warm and wet start to summer which has caused a bunch of new growth, thats going to die and dry come Feb and i'll be keeping a go bag in my car.

Agreed. I don't see anything from a google search that suggests that they cut the number of firefighters, either.

Hyperbolic statements like "gutted" are just meant to get the knee jerk, frothing at the mouth "retweet" kind of reaction, and it seems to be being successful at that.

Regarding what was actually cut, do the cuts include the firefighting equipment sent to Ukraine? Sounds like that was mostly hoses and extra PPE, not major force-multiplier systems needed for this type of fire: https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/vital-la-firefighting...

And why is there apparently no water in the fire hydrants? Something about the reservoir not being refilled appropriately?

> why is there apparently no water in the fire hydrants?

They emptied the tanks fighting the fire.

From the article in the GP comment:

  The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power in a Wednesday press conference refuted claims, including those made by Caruso, that water tanks in Pacific Palisades weren’t fully filled ahead of the fire.

  Departmental officials said the three tanks in the area were filled to capacity with around 1 million gallons of water each, but those supplies were tapped out by early Wednesday morning.

  “We ran out of water and the first tank about 4:45pm yesterday, we ran out of water on the second tank about 8:30pm and the third tank about 3am this morning,” said Janisse Quiñones, CEO of LADWP.

Thanks for the info. So is the take-away here that the tanks are under-specified? Should they have maybe 10x the total capacity? Have there been other indications over the years that tank capacity might be a problem with a large enough fire?

Not my country .. but .. I did read that the Fire Chiefs wanted more tanks but NIMBY resistance prevailed.

Fire tanks are generally "slow to fill* and "fast to empty" in relative terms - they form a local cache for rapid drawdown at rates much faster than "normal" water system draw.

There's also strong element in twitter and US news of petty critic for politic points .. "The hydrants are empty and there's no water" might be that kind of complaint, eg: "we emptied the tanks here holding the fire front back, the front has now moved, the tanks are now refilling" might well be the source of what became a damning meme "the hydrants are empty".

Three million gallons is a few large swimming pools of water. Is there no way to draw from a larger source? For comparison, the Hollywood reservoir is 2.5 billion gallons.

> Is there no way to draw from a larger source?

What are your thoughts on that question?

I'm in Australia, while I cannot personally answer your question wrt these specific tanks I do imagine there was some means by which they were filled to the brim.

I'm not sure why the percentage matters? Whether it's 2% or 20%, it's still millions of dollars that could have been used here. More broadly, why are we cutting fire department budgets when wildfires are becoming more frequent, more intense and a year round phenomenon due to global warming? If you want to trim fat in the government there are much bigger targets to go after than an essential service like firefighting.

It doesn't seem to me that the GP comment is arguing for the cut in funding, but rather that 'gutted' may reasonably imply to many readers that a relatively significant portion of the budget was cut, which would be misleading in this case even if unintentional. The percentage helps put the number into context as at least I would not have an intuitive sense of expected or historical LAFD budget numbers.

Thank you for providing context, I edited the comment and changed "gutted" to "cut".

Which other fat targets should local governments cut? Please be specific and quantitative.

Great question, lets take a look at the 2024-2025 budget sheet for LA City:

https://cao.lacity.gov/budget/summary/2024-25%20Budget%20Sum...

(This PDF is great, props to whoever made it for making it so easy and accessible for normal people to read.)

If you look at the pie chart on Page 11, you will see that by far the largest slice of the pie is the police budget. It's 45% of LA County's entire budget, totalling almost $2 billion. The LAPD's budget for one fiscal year is larger than most country's GDPs, yet crime is still rampant in Los Angeles. So that's the first place I would start. You could probably find $23 million sitting between the couch cushions at LAPD's headquarters.

So the police budget is 2B.

The fire budget is ~800M. Pretty significant by itself.

You keep throwing around this 23M number like a 3% change would make a material impact on 3 fast-spreading huge fires in worst-case-scenario conditions.

What do you think the budget would need to be to handle this? In a scenario that goes deep, such as how water pressure is low because of how much demand is coming from so many hydrants? 100M more? 200M? 500M? 1B?

Is committing to that much more annually the best solution here?

Factoring in inflation, anything other than positive is already a cut and there was an explicit cut on top

"You keep throwing around this 23M number like a 3% change would make a material impact on 3 fast-spreading huge fires in worst-case-scenario conditions."

Take 23M and tell me how many firefighters that'd hire, plus equipment to support them. then tell me if that equipment would've been sufficient to at least contain the fires instead of having the damage we have now.

Protip as a former Memphis FD Volunteer: Every damn dollar counts.

It was a 17M cut from a greater than $800 million Fire allocation, not 23M. Of that:

(see up thread peer comment for source)

Further, with a constrained revenue and something like 63% of the entiire state budget going to Police and Fire it appears that the California Fire budget lost out a little to the California Police budget.

There's the arena for fighting this out, a good old badge on badge bar fight over $$$'s.

> totalling almost $2 billion. The LAPD's budget for one fiscal year is larger than most country's GDPs

In case anyone was curious, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nomi... suggests that ~17 countries have a GDP of less than $2 billion per year. Seeing as how there are 193+ countries, this means that the LAPD budget exceeds the GDP of fewer than 10% of countries. (The median country GDP is ~$50 billion per year.)

For some extra context: while these 17 countries include some very poor countries, the primary reason that they have such small GDPs is their small population. Their combined population is approximately the same as the city of Los Angeles.

Most of it is in liability payouts. The LA City Controller has a fantastic instagram account and website https://controller.lacity.gov/

Wait a second - you're suggesting to cut LAPD funding because "crime is still rampant in Los Angeles"?

Wouldn't that be the same as advocating for cuts in the LAFD funding because they weren't able to do much about the wildfires anyway?

That doesn't seem to be the best way to go about things, at least not to me.

How much of the city budget does the LAPD need for crime to finally go down then? 60%? 80%? Maybe all of it, replace the mayor with the police commissioner and run the city like a quasi-military dictatorship?

Studies have found "no consistent correlations between increased police spending and municipal crime rates". Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/27/world/canada/canada-lette...

Unlike policing, where clear alternatives to it like mental healthcare, drug rehabilitation and social welfare programs exist, there isn't really an alternative to the firefighting service for stopping fires.

A smartass could say that national, state, and local legislatures could eliminate crime with a stroke of the pen - no money required. Just eliminate laws.

Meanwhile, people aren't necessarily concerned with the crime rate, per se. There are crimes we care about more than others, namely, violent personal crimes: muggings, felonious assault, rape, and murder. Close on its heels are property crimes: breaking and entering, vandalism, and robbery.

Given the crimes the majority of the people actually care about, can we say that the LA crime rate has not gone down?

Meanwhile, 20% of the hydrants ran dry in the Palisades. Increased LAFD funding isn't going to change anything about that. This isn't even getting into whether it's reasonable for a municipal government to be prepared to battle a wildfire enveloping an entire region. I don't think there's a city in the United States that could take that on.

> It's 45% of LA County's entire budget, totalling almost $2 billion. The LAPD's budget for one fiscal year is larger than most country's GDPs, yet crime is still rampant in Los Angeles. So that's the first place I would start.

That's like arguing that since Los Angeles public school's budget is $18.8 billion[1], yet scores are still poor[2], we should cut the public school budget.

[1] https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2024-06-26/lausd-ap... [2] https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2024-10-11/lausd-ma...

Crime is rampant, cut the police budget. I hear ya'.

Judging by the history of the Los Angeles Police Department and their own gangs, run by members of the department, policemen, getting rid of cops might actually help reduce crime!

I was responding to the poster who also said:

"...why are we cutting fire department budgets when wildfires are becoming more frequent..."

If you're going to say we need more money budgeted to the Fire Dept. because fires are becoming frequent and then say in your next breath we need to cut the budget of the Police because crime is becoming more frequent....

FWIW that's LASD, not LAPD

LAPD has a history of its own…

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Community_Resources_Against_...

The question is whether quality of life can be improved in the city with a better allocation of the $2 billion dollars.

Some should go to policing, yes, community policing should increase, working the stats should decrease, dedicated mental health professionals should be funded and replace a good number of police interactions, etc.

This is a large and complex topic that deserves better than ankle deep engagement.

Red light and speed cameras would do 50x the work that cops are supposed to be doing here and cost substantially less

My idea is to have [optional] speed limiters. The generalized speed limits are very crude. Setting different speed for [small] parts of roads using signs has its limits. We attempt to fix dangerous spots by design, it is a wonderful art but not perfect. You can probably solve a lot of congestion by raising the maximum speed where it makes sense. It also allows for limited control over how many cars try to uses the same road. Traffic jams become bugs. It can log your speed on different roads, if there is a violation it can be treated like a bug too rather than a violation. If you don't have a limiter you can still move along with traffic. If there is a mark on the license plate it is not going to fast.

Drastically cutting the police budget is almost certainly a good idea. The problem is that you can't just count everything you take from the police budget as extra money because even though the police aren't able to competently do a lot of the work they are currently being utilized for somebody still needs to do that work and they also have to be paid. At least initially it would require an investment to get a better agency to start handling that stuff.

That said, I'm sure there is plenty of opportunity to cut waste too and in addition to slashing the police budget a great way to recover some tax money being burned by the police would be to clean up the department so that taxpayers aren't on the hook for the millions spent in lawsuits generated by their repeated abuses, screw ups, workplace injustices, etc. Much of that actually would be free money.

For $2B you could save a lot of lives even through the overpriced medical system. With a number this big, whatever you do with $2B has to be way better than saving those lives.

If crime is rampant at a $2,000,000,000 spend, then you're spending it poorly.

If the strategy isn't working at $2 billion, what makes you think it will start working at $2.1 billion?

The responsibility is on the supporters to demonstrate the efficacy of the current approach. Where are the results?

Couldn't the same be said of a fire department with a $800,000,000 budget? Clearly they're not doing so hot, we should cut it further.

no. not really. The spread of the viewline fire was contained, the getty villa was saved, the hurst fire is being contained and they were on the sunset one pretty quickly. There was one in culver city and woodley that they quashed quickly as well. They got the divide fire from igniting angeles national forest and the lidia. The royal fire is about where the 2018 fire was and that was taken down as well today as was the sunswept, freddy, and emma fire.

that's the past 24 hours.

If you've been following this, they've done a fairly amazing job at knocking out maybe a dozen fires in the past day. Many of these had the potential to be giant infernos and you can actively see very clear evidence of them being contained and suppressed as the fire crews responded.

The evacuation orders and rescue operations were also effective and remarkably little life has been lost.

On the contrary, with crime, there's things like the 1992 Watts truce, which is credited with a rapid decline in LA street violence, which happened without law enforcement at all.

So unlike with say fire-fighting, there's empirically more effective strategies for dealing with crime. They do, however, require us to not be ideologically committed to punitive incarceration.

El Salvador fixed the crime issue with weapons and a strict policy, but in California it may not be such widely accepted.

Police helicopters

Are you for real?

That’s on top of about 3.4% inflation from 2023 to 2024. So over a 5% cut in real terms.

Actually we don’t have that information. Often when governments talk about budget cuts they already are pricing it in real terms, or against projected budget increase.

Unfortunately we have a news article reporting a tweet.

Inflation in CA over the past 3 years is likely 50% (my personal estimation for necessities is over 100%) If you cut 2%, you're really cutting it by 52%. There's no way someone will want to work for peanuts. It has been gutted.

Unfortunately that 2% was the part going to actual firefighters. The other 98% was administrative overhead. Both remaining firefighters are spread thin.

From the budget papers (page 11) themselves, $774 million went to salaries, $46 million to expenses.

https://cao.lacity.gov/budget/summary/2024-25%20Budget%20Sum...

Page 6 shows a water flow from revenues to expenditures.

> by a skeleton crew of remaining fire fighters and volunteers.

I think you're missing a major contributor which is California's prison population [0]. Prisoners getting paid around $3-$5 a day make up ~1/3 of California's wildfire fighting service. Maybe you consider them to be "volunteers" but that seems to be missing some important context.

0. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/the-history-of-califo...

(Very interesting info you found!)

It seems to be a great way to reengage in the community and feel useful as a human being (and see people being grateful to you).

Not so sure the $5 are the driver here.

Better than watching a cellmate all day.

Slave labor (which is permitted under the 13th amendment as punishment for a crime) undercuts the wages that you would pay in the market hurting both the prisoners (as they aren't paid appropriately or given appropriate medical care for injuries, etc) and the would-be non-prison firefighters.

Worse, you generally can't be a firefighter once you get out of prison as they don't hire ex-convicts. Consequently you're not even learning a useful job skill. Note that this hard-ban was relaxed in California specifically in 2020 under AB2147 (allowing prisoners who participated in firefighting programs to apply to have their records expunged in certain cases) -- but applies elsewhere in the US.

Yep, and just to drive home the point the official motto of the California Conservation Corps, which does a lot fire fighting and prevention in the state, is “Hard work, low pay, miserable conditions, and more.”[0]

I get that the motto is somewhat tongue in cheek but still, slave labor does tend to distort markets.

[0]https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/article/natio...

To be clear, fighting fires is done by prisoners who volunteer and my understanding is that it is highly sought after

Can the prisoners volunteer to be teachers or work at Meta too, or is only one market affected?

I'm not informed on the specifics on these cases, but I generally view that (many/most) prisoners have a debt to society for breaking the social contract and serving the community by making it safer is a generally positive activity. I'm happy to adjust my opinion on this topic if provided evidence that inmate firefighters either are unsafe for the community or have worse outcomes than other inmates.

> I'm not informed on the specifics on these cases, but I generally view that (many/most) prisoners have a debt to society for breaking the social contract and serving the community by making it safer is a generally positive activity.

Yes -- but -- by undercutting the wages you would have to pay people outside, it lowers the pay of the non-prison laborers. This hurts that community.

You can achieve the same result by paying them prevailing wage. This has the extra benefit of giving them some saved up money to start a new life when they get out, helping them avoid falling back into a life of crime to make ends meet.

Like HB1 workers broke the social contract by being not born in the us?

> You can achieve the same result by paying them prevailing wage. This has the extra benefit of giving them some saved up money to start a new life when they get out, helping them avoid falling back into a life of crime to make ends meet.

I don’t see how you can do this, because you turn punishment into privilege. If the way to firefighter pay is through a jail cell you create all kind of problems around perverse incentives.

And if the way to cheap labor for risky, highly needed manual labor is through incarcerating people, you create all kind of problems around perverse incentives.

Yes, unless it is voluntary, which it is.

Is anything in prison really voluntary?

Nobody is stopping you from being a firefighter outside of jail.

Have you tried? Do you have your certs? Would you pass the physical? Background check?

I mean if your concern is "people in prison have an easier path to being a firefighter" maybe we should reconsider what it means to be one?

My concern only becomes an issue if prisons put them on parity with actual trained firefighters (as was being suggested, but is not the case). Presently they are not, and they are not used that way. They usually do not do the same types or level of work.

I think the first step is people educating themselves even marginally on the topic of discussion before proposing policy changes.

This also has to be balanced against the perverse incentive to construct bullshit laws to justify mass incarceration to get more prison slaves. Not a hypothetical either; this actually happened, because the US Constitution actually says very little about human rights.

No one has a response, they just downvote because they don’t like the reality of the situation?

Because no one is actually seriously proposing to pay prisoners the same rate as real firefighters; we just shouldn't be using prisoners. Would you allow prisoners to volunteer as teachers, nurses, engineers? Why is the market for firefighters the only one that gets free volunteers from this pool?

But it's not just hurting the firefighter market, lots of people just have issues with using prisoners as slaves.

> Would you allow prisoners to volunteer as teachers, nurses, engineers?

If part of their job description was the equivalent of clearing brush/cutting fire lines in emergencies, I might consider it.

> Why is the market for firefighters the only one that gets free volunteers from this pool?

Do you have another source of willing, not-risk-averse, physically fit and competent people that are not doing anything else, know each other already, can be there ready to work together at a moment’s notice, and won’t bail partway through to go fill an instacart order?

I find it curious that some people here consider it as slavery ?

It is an optional activity if I understand right.

It seems rewarding to do a training to become a firefighter and join the team, than to idle in prison.

It is a volunteer role. Many people in the world become volunteers in the firefighters, a lot are unpaid. They do it for reasons beyond money (making friends, feeling useful, helping people, etc).

A prisoner may get some carrot as a reward (like less served time) but at the end, they all benefit.

Volunteering to do work so you can shorten your sentence is slavery, yes.

Not volunteering and not shortening your sentence… isn’t?

I wonder if they have favorable consideration when applying to fire departments after they get out.

As I understand it, no. Most counties require that you have an EMT license to be a firefighter, and many people with conviction histories are barred from getting EMT licenses (Title 22 § 100214.3(c)). There was a bill a few years ago that allowed CalFire specifically to hire people as firefighters with an alternate credential that doesn't have a blanket-ban on people with conviction histories.

It's often the opposite, where their conviction bars them from even applying for a job.

> Not so sure the $5 are the driver here.

There aren't a lot of opportunities to earn money in prison. Having money in prison is important. Although having work time credits are more important as those earn you an early release.

> Better than watching a cellmate all day.

No one is doing that anyways.

I really don't understand how SoCal and California residents in general find the the state's response to wildfires in the last decade to be acceptable. Not only have fire departments seen cutbacks, but so has the forestry needed for preventative measures.

What really bugs me is what I find to be a disinterest and lack of belief in vastly expanding the fleet of water dropping aircraft. Letting fires burn to the extent that they have been isn't cheap, to put it lightly. Somehow, a state that is one of the largest economies in the world can't or won't expand its aerial response such that fires of the scale we are seeing become a thing of the past. With satellite technology, it should be possible to identify wildfires as they begin and immediately deploy hundreds if not 1000+ planes to dump water from the Pacific and reservoirs, while drones go ahead of them to confirm that an out-of-control fire is actually in progress.

I can anticipate being told this is not possible or too expensive, which is what everyone I know seems to believe, but I don't buy it.

If anyone ever runs for governor and makes my proposal their single issue platform, I will vote for them regardless of political party or whether it is truly feasible up to the extent that I am imagining. Fuck wildfires.

Wildfires, unfortunately, have a way of "not caring in the slightest about what people think of them." Throw in the winds of southern CA, and a wildfire can go from "freshly started" to "a few thousand acres" by the time anyone manages to get their boots on and equipment started. You don't fight wildfires in 60-100mph winds. Firebombers can't fly in those winds (or at night, since it's close to terrain), and even if they did, that sort of wind will scatter your drop before it has a chance to do anything useful.

> With satellite technology, it should be possible to identify wildfires as they begin and immediately deploy hundreds if not 1000+ planes to dump water from the Pacific and reservoirs, while drones go ahead of them to confirm that an out-of-control fire is actually in progress.

Great, you've just put out the fire, and kicked the can for next time. Even if it did work that way, it doesn't fix the root problem, which is simply:

Many western forests need to burn. Not in the sort of uncontrolled canopy fires we see with this sort of situation, but a lower, "clean the brush out, candle off some weaker trees, and open up the seeds" sort of fire. The problem is, for most of the past century, we haven't been allowing them to burn. Wildfire fighting in the US really ramped up and became a capable force with the post-WWII surplus - Jeeps, bombers that could be bought for nothing and converted to fire bombers, cheap spotting aircraft. So, for about 80 years, we've been fighting fires - or, explained differently, "We've been letting fire load build up for 80 years." When those areas light, with most of a century worth of buildup, they go off like a bomb, and your option in high winds is to "get out of the way."

You cannot allow endless fuel growth in a forest without consequences - and we're out of runway on that. All the aerial firefighting in the world won't fix that problem, because it's not the problem that needs fixing.

Where I live we routinely do prescribed (planned) burns and aim to mosaic the landscape | fuel load regions to break up high load buildups.

See (for example): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fKsLRNbczJY

Cool burning's been going on for several thousand years (geolocked?): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RM72NtXxyLs

That’s a political hot potato in California right now. CALFIRE has been advocating for prescribed burns for decades but it doesn’t have jurisdiction over all the lands owned by the federal government and the 35 California Air Districts mired in local politics are responsible for issuing the permits for those burns. Lots of NIMBYs who pressure the district boards to withhold those permits for air quality reasons.

There’s hope that this series of events will cause them to reevaluate but prescribed burns wouldn’t have helped in the Palisades anyway.

It's not a binary choice between expanding aircraft and doing nothing. I have seen some convincing arguments that firefighting aircraft are mostly for show against large fires. Essentially the amount of water/chemicals they can move is trivial compared to land approaches, and the cost is significant. That doesn't mean that nothing should be done, just that the money should be spent on more effective measures.

Lord knows I'm not going to defend the competence of the CA state govt and I'm sure they could be protecting against wildfires better, but I don't know that railing about the number of aircraft involved will help anything.

Essentially the amount of water/chemicals they can move is trivial compared to land approaches

I'm sure that's correct for many geographies, but most of this fire is burning on steep mountainsides and in canyons without road access, or an occasional dirt road and no water connection. With the amount of wind, probably nothing could be done, land or air, once this started.

edit: Here is a glimpse of the terrain: https://x.com/firevalleyphoto/status/1876731317464760629

Even the populated areas in the Palisades fire have roads that are remarkably poor. A lot of them are windy, with negligible visibility around corners, and are barely a single lane. I doubt that a fire truck can get through many of them easily even under ideal conditions.

How much water do you need to dump enough to saturate all the territory that would need to be covered with wind gusts up to 100MPH? (How do you fly and aim the water in those winds?)

Wildfires are obviously not new, if you're saying the fault is of the administration of the last 10 years, how do you explain that the earlier government for the fifty years prior ALSO failed to see and implement your "just dump the water everywhere from planes" approach to the fires in the 90s, say?

We're, what, 13 years from terrible financials for the state and local governments that forced widespread major cuts and furloughs and reduction in hours? Everyone who's been hit by those can point to negative outcomes somewhere or other (crime is up! education achievement stats are down! wait times are up! etc) but there's no free lunch here to just have avoided any cutbacks in any area.

Hundreds or thousands of planes???

“Federal agencies are responsible for managing 200 to 300 wildland fire aircraft.” - Nat’l Interagency Fire Center, https://www.nifc.gov/resources/aircraft

“CAL FIRE’s fleet of more than 60 fixed and rotary wing aircraft make it the largest civil aerial firefighting fleet in the world.” — CAL FIRE, https://www.fire.ca.gov/what-we-do/fire-protection/aviation-...

I was throwing out a number. Clearly, my perspective is that we need more water-dropping aircraft than we have or that we are borrowing.

Buying more firefighting equipment is like building a dam higher and higher every year as the reservoir fills up, instead of letting it drain out gradually. The natural cycle in California is for there to be periodic fires, but due to the policy of suppression, they haven't happened for 70 years or more, so now when they do, they are these massive infernos.

Better and better fire suppression tech over the years that enables a quicker response, like aircraft, satellite monitoring, remote video cameras, etc, has just served to make the problem worse in the long run.

That's not quite what's going on with these particular fires. They weren't caused by excessive fire suppression. Most of the terrain involved is chaparral rather than forest. The previous two years had relatively high rainfall which caused a lot of fast brush growth. This season has had much less rainfall so everything dried out, creating tinderbox conditions. In those areas we have to rely more on clearing defensible space around structures.

https://youtu.be/gunenpZ5JuE

The forest management issues are valid but apply more to other parts of the state.

California has a problem with overly aggressive fire suppression over the last 100 years creating a buildup of extra-flammable burnable areas. Literally, you need to let a certain amount of burning go on, continuously over time, so that the burnable areas aren't over-fueled tinderboxes that get very hot, very fast.

Part of this is using controlled burns to mitigate the buildup, another thing that's been under-resourced in California.

I had a discussion at a B and B with a guy who flew F-16s in the USAF, then U2s once they were going to promote him out of flying. He'd just left the service and had retrained to fly Grumman water bombers for Calfire. The problem as I've described it is apparently well-known in the wildfire fighting community in Californa.

That's true in general but not really applicable to these fires. It's mostly chaparral that's burning, and most of the dry brush has built up over only a few years — not 100. We had two years of heavy rains that caused a lot of brush growth, and then this season it all dried out.

Controlled burns in that terrain are impractical because there are too many structures nearby and a controlled burn can turn into an uncontrolled burn in minutes. A more realistic approach would be expanding defensible space and culling non-native flora.

https://youtu.be/gunenpZ5JuE

Interesting. Wikipedia [1] also says that these biomes are supposed to have canopy fires rather than smaller burns. I'm a bit skeptical (seems awefully convenient), but it looks like the 500 year climate record supports this idea [2].

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaparral

[2] https://doi.org/10.1006/qres.1999.2035

If this is the case, then homes in this biome need to be engineered to survive nearby canopy fires every few generations.

Very good info.

California recently acquired several C-130H firefighting aircraft. These are extremely expensive platforms and while they're useful for fast response in some scenarios they're hardly a complete solution. For these particular fires the winds were often too strong for air tankers to fly. Effective fire prevention and suppression requires a variety of different solutions. It would be foolish to focus on a single issue.

https://www.gov.ca.gov/2024/08/26/c-130-hercules-is-now-figh...

The wind is too high for aerial firefighting. You could have every firefighting plane in the world in LA right now and it wouldn't matter. None of them can fly.

Do you have some reason to believe more planes is the best allocation of resources?

Not an expert: I think one of the issues is that there's only a handful[0] of satellites with the appropriate infrared instruments, which means that any given point of Earth is only sampled at a multiple-hour cadence.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fire_Information_for_Resource_...

It's a generic problem for any sensing problem that's real-time + low-orbit.

I speculate adding instruments to large LEO constellations, en masse, would solve that problem—though I have no clue if that's practical. (Perhaps if the same instrument were doing other kinds of real-time imaging, you could piggyback wildfire alerts on that datastream, and the get the functionality essentially for free?)

edit: More info:

- "Geostationary satellite sensors view the same area of Earth’s surface at all times while polar-orbiting sensors, such as MODIS and VIIRS, typically view the same area of Earth’s surface twice daily. Consequently, geostationary satellite sensors can provide repeated observations on a sub-hourly basis, making it possible to detect fires which may not be detected at longer temporal intervals. Geostationary satellites provide data at 10-15 minute intervals, so they can detect more fire events and capture their growth and change. However, the spatial resolution of geostationary satellite data is coarser and therefore less sensitive to small fires."

https://www.earthdata.nasa.gov/data/tools/firms/faq

2% means gutted? 2% less funding means only a skeleton crew is left?

Depends: did it have a lot of excess capacity before the cuts?

That’s wholly immaterial to the word choice. Come on.

"Gutted" sure, but yes it's absolutely possible to go from functional staffing to totally non-functional with a 2% budget reduction depending on the org's structure and where the budget cuts come from.

The city of Los Angeles and the Mayor have been requesting volunteers from the public, due to lack of manpower. According to their website [1] the salary for firefighters in Los Angeles is $85,000 to $125,000 (rounded). Assuming the average ($105,000), that amount of funding could have paid 161 firefighters salaries for the entire year, not including benefits (unsure how that is priced in), and much more than that if they were part-time which most of the force are.

https://www.joinlafd.org/salary-and-benefits

> The city of Los Angeles and the Mayor have been requesting volunteers from the public

That's not true. The call last night was for all off-duty firefighters to report their availability, not for members of the public.

Clearly LAFD / LACFD need more manpower, but there's more then enough merit to make that case without misinformation.

For reference the LAPD budget is $175 million per month.

The fire budget was cut by $17.6 million for the year, the 23M cut was proposed. The police budget was increased by $126M for the year.

For context, the LAFD annual budget is $820M and the LAPD annual budget is $2140M.

There is no meaningful sense in which firefighters are "fighting" this fire, nor could they.

> Patrick Soon-Shiong, the billionaire owner of the Los Angeles Times, slammed Bass in an X post claiming the mayor slashed the Los Angeles Fire Department’s budget, despite the high risk of wildfires in the region, and raised questions about reports that some fire hydrants in the Pacific Palisades had run dry.

It's kind of rich that a local billionaire would complain about this. I'm going to guess that the $23M was cut due to budget shortfalls. Maybe if the billionaires and multi-millionaires in the area were willing to pay their fair share that wouldn't have happened.

Soon-Shiong has aligned with Trump, and is openly forcing LA Times journalists to serve his interests. Usually a major newspaper owner would try to avoid the appearance of bias or of undermining the objectivity of the news.

https://www.thewrap.com/la-times-case-against-trump-kamala-e...

https://www.npr.org/2024/10/24/nx-s1-5163293/la-times-editor...

https://www.theguardian.com/media/2024/dec/18/la-times-patri...

"fair share" is always defined as more than they pay now, I've noticed.

Seems like he knows his way around the financial system:

https://www.healthcareitnews.com/news/politico-uncovers-more...

Is your opinion that extremely wealthy don't try to reduce their tax share as much as possible, either through clever accounting on their current year taxes or by influencing politicians/policies to lower their taxes directly?

Why do most middle class earners pay more than their millionaire and billionaire counterparts as a percentage? Sure you might say W2 tax rate is higher than capital gains, but why is that the case?

Of course they do, same as everyone else.

The rich pay the vast majority of taxes and get next to nothing for it.

Please explain how they get next to nothing? We have a pretty damn functional society - police, firemen, judges, law and order, a military, roads, and the ability for them to do business and get richer. Society entails that those able to provide more, so that's just part of it. We ask able bodied men to most serve on the front lines of our military, mothers most often play the role of raising our youth, we are have a role to play and in return we get live petty peacefully.

Do you have a better model?

They certainly hoard more than their "fair share" of wealth.

Nothing certain about that.

100% certain that no human deserves to be a billion times wealthier than the least wealthy human.

I don't know why you think that.

because i am a human who sees the inherent value of all humanity, divorced from their wealth. i see wealth hoarding as an addiction, a sickness, and a danger to others.

Inherit value has nothing to do with wealth, and billionaires are not hoarding.

lol exactly

this is disinformation. CalFIRE at the State of California had a 10x budget increase in the 2020 time frame under Gov Newsom. LA County has budgets larger than small countries. Fire suppression is a priority.

These fires have spread quickly and it is true that fire fighters are spread thin.

Exactly. There's only so much they can do. They couldn't fly aircraft. Spread to a huge area rapidly, the area isn't even that easy to get in/out of on a good day. Add in another couple fires that also rapidly spread and it really doesn't matter how much money they had, you can't just bring on firefighters that fast.

I'm glad to see all the aircraft are working the fires and hopefully they'll make some good progress before night.

This is slightly misleading because it doesn't take into account the extra funding they got when contract negotiations finished

Your source debunked itself a few hours later.

https://www.politico.com/news/2025/01/08/wildfire-threatens-...

This whole subthread should be printed out, preserved, exhibited in museums about the spread of misinformation among gullible Silicon Valley commenters, but also deleted from this site. It's an embarrassment.

Interesting that at the same time the police department's budget increased by $126 million

I would be more concerned about Climate Change. No amount of money will help.

Never allowing the forest to burn, which is a part of its natural cycle, is a form a drastic climate change for the forest.

Proper management of the forest means selecting a time to do these burns. If we don't select a time, mother nature will select one for us.

Yes, global temperature rise is real, and could potentially have had some effect on the fire. Completely disrupting the natural cycle of the forest is a much bigger deal.

I was curious to learn why we "never allow the forest to burn", given that Cal Fire for example has a whole department of Prescribed Fire. Sounds like the problem is lawyers and property owners:

> One of the primary obstacles to increasing the pace and scale of beneficial fire use in California is the difficulty for practitioners to obtain adequate liability coverage, although the rates and losses from escapes are very low.

https://www.fire.ca.gov/what-we-do/natural-resource-manageme...

> Sounds like the problem is lawyers and property owners:

Some of them might change their mind now that they’re owners of some acres of charcoal.

You cannot not choose a time - it’ll get chosen for you. Schedule should be known, cost included in taxes, risks known when property was acquired, liabilities limited in state or federal regulation. Weather doesn’t care about lawyers.

These fires are mostly burning chaparral, not forest. Better forest management is a good idea in general but not relevant to this article.

It's of course terrible what's happening in LA. But we're talking about a rich area in a rich city in a state that is very rich and I just read an article about some pretty famous people that I've heard off losing their houses that collectively probably have a net worth hundreds of millions (or individually in some cases) that lost their houses. They'll be fine, financially at least. You'd struggle to find a richer place in the world.

Some things that crossed my mind:

- Affected people probably spend way more on personal security, lawyers, dog grooming, plastic surgery, etc. than on fire safety in that area. I.e. all the extravagant nonsense that spoiled millionaires in LA and these areas in LA specifically are famous for spending their money on. I watched the new beverly hills cop movie on Netflix over the summer (not amazing) that makes fun of that specifically.

- Given the string of wild fires specifically in LA in the last few years, how is it that they are not more prepared for this and what genius decided that now was a good moment to cut spending on the fire department? And who voted that clown into office? Oh wait that would be the same people that live there that donate money to all sorts of causes by the bucket load.

That doesn't help the people there right now. And I'm sure there are some people caught up in this that are less well off, which totally sucks. But I'm sure charity events will be organized and I'm sure there will be quite a few millionaires attending and performing at these events.

But my point is that they don't exactly have a lot of excuses for not organizing the most awesome, best funded and equipped fire department in the world. Also, on the prevention side there is probably a thing or two that could have been done to e.g. clear out areas of bone dry bushes, wood, etc. that are well known fire hazards. I don't think there's a lot of ignorance on that front that needs addressing.

also, it has been known for quite some time how damaging the near total reliance on cars and the associated infrastructure at that scale is. If you do absolutely nothing about climate change when you have the most resources to do so, then I cannot feel sorry about anything that's happening.

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