During an interview with KTLA on Monday, Los Angeles City Councilwoman Traci Park reacted to Mayor Karen Bass removing Kristin Crowley as Fire Chief by stating that everyone knew about the fire danger and budget cuts “led to operational impacts. That means there weren’t enough bodies or resources to do what needed to be done.”
Park responded to Bass claiming she wasn’t adequately warned about the fire danger by saying, “The communications about the very dangerous weather [were] ubiquitous. It was on every news channel. It was on every radio channel. It was everywhere — and social media. The fire department was blaring out that this was a dangerous circumstance. The mayor’s own communications said that she was urgently deploying city departments. So, I don’t know what to make of that, frankly. … I can’t speak to what she knew or what her team advised her of. I don’t have any insight to that. What I can say is that, basically, everybody in the city of Los Angeles knew that we were headed into very, very dangerous circumstances.”
She added, “Chief Crowley has been very clear and consistent in her message, from day one, that our fire department does not have the staffing and resources that it needs to keep Los Angeles safe on an average day. She warned, the Mayor…in early December that she did not have what she needed to prepare for or respond to a major emergency like a wildfire, and that is why I and members of the union went to Fire Commission on December 17 to stand in solidarity with the Chief, united in our focus on righting the ship on these issues so that what happened in the Palisades doesn’t happen anywhere else.”
Park further stated, “There were operational impacts because of the eliminated civilian positions…the amount of money in the initial tranche allocated to the fire department, which included elimination of civilian positions and overtime hours absolutely impacted the Chief’s ability to do what she needed to, which is, in the initial tranche that they were provided, it wasn’t enough, which is part of why we went to Fire Commission on December 17 and said, this urgently needs to be fixed, now.”
She concluded, “The budget was done in two parts. The first part was not enough to give the department what they needed under the circumstances, which is why we went to Fire Commission in December and said, we have got to make this right, now. … If you look at the first tranche of the budget and you compare it to the entirety of last year, yes, it’s less, but there was another tranche on the way, but, unfortunately, there was a gap that led to operational impacts. That means there weren’t enough bodies or resources to do what needed to be done. But we had that knowledge back in December and Chief Crowley has been very consistent in her message about that from day one, and nothing that she has said since January 7 has changed.”
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