Things are going from bad to worse in Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass’ office.
Just days after reports that she’d planned to can her fire chief, Kristin Crowley, after she publicly criticized the level of funding she’d received from the city, Bass is facing intense criticism yet again from a memo up on a city website, which shows that just months ago, the chief practically begged city hall to stop its budget-cutting spree on fire response.
The memo, which was dated Nov. 18, was written to the fire commissioners, according to the Washington Free Beacon. That’s a five-person board appointed by Bass.
In Crowley’s memo, she urged the commissioners to let Bass and the city council know how dire the situation was.
“In many ways, the current staffing, deployment model, and size of the LAFD have not changed since the 1960s,” Crowley wrote.
In the memo, she said that there had been a dramatic increase in emergency calls — and given the fact that the staffing levels were below standards, it’s no surprise that response times were on the rise.
“In 2022, Crowley said, 61 percent of the department’s firefighters failed to meet the 4-minute first response time, a national firefighting standard,” the Free Beacon reported.
“The National Fire Protection Association, meanwhile, recommends that cities like Los Angeles employ some 1.51 to 1.81 firefighters per 1,000 residents. But Los Angeles, Crowley wrote, only staffs 0.91 firefighters per 1,000 people.”
Now, of course, over 12,000 buildings have burned to the ground and 40,000 acres have burned. Over 150,000 residents are under evacuation orders, and 24 have died as of Monday, according to The Wall Street Journal.
Is Karen Bass the worst mayor in all of America?
Yes: 94% (45 Votes)
No: 6% (3 Votes)
So what has Bass’ Los Angeles done? Delete the document, naturally.
While the document had been referenced in several media reports — including a New York Times article from Thursday that linked to it and a KNBC dispatch that references the memo starting at 3:30 — it’s now been memory-holed by Bass, now seeming to actively trying to carve out a place as America’s worst big-city mayor, or her people:
Clicking on the link now takes you to a “404! We are sorry, but the page you requested was not found” page.
When asked about the deletion of the memo, Bass’ office didn’t respond directly to it, instead directing the Free Beacon to an article about her negotiating a $53 million pay raise for firefighters through “additional salary costs” in the Los Angeles Times.
However, as is well known at this point, Bass cut the budget by $17 million last year. To the extent that costs have been ballooning, it hasn’t been in supplanting its wanting service but paying more for its existing system after the budget had taken effect.
While this may lure more firefighters in the long run, this certainly wasn’t the aim of Bass’ budget — nor is addressing the concerns Chief Crowley has brought to everyone’s attention.
Instead, when Crowley went public with the concerns last week — something that would have come up anyway, given the fact that the memo was going to be obtained sooner rather than later — boss Bass was so mad that Crowley believed she was getting fired.
Before their meeting, Crowley was “telling everybody goodbye, because she was told the whole purpose of the meeting was to fire her,” a source said, according to the U.K.’s Daily Mail.
“When she was summoned into the meeting, it was with the direct purpose to fire her,” the source said. “Whatever happened in that meeting, minds got changed.
“Either Bass realized it would be suicide to fire her, and came to her senses, or Crowley talked her out of it.”
If Bass thought that was suicide, what does deleting a report which detailed exactly how bad things were under her watch qualify as? Asking for a recall-bait mayor whose career will forever be defined by the wildfires she’s mismanaged and the lives she’s ruined.
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