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Comment by defrost | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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