Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass (D) reportedly awarded government workers with major wage increases before making cuts to the city’s fire department budget.
“Mayor Karen Bass’s budget cuts to the city’s fire department, enacted just months ago amid warnings about the city’s deteriorating finances, stand out as a striking example of misplaced priorities,” The City Journal reported on Friday:
The cuts stemmed from a budget crisis triggered by her administration’s decision to reward city employees with rich contracts and benefits—even as it dismissed worries that the reductions would hurt services. “Predictions that city services will be impossible to deliver,” deputy mayor Zach Seidl told the press, “are simply false.” Few public statements have aged as poorly—or as hauntingly—as this one.
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Shortly after taking office, Bass began negotiating with public sector unions over expiring contracts. Early last year, those talks resulted in more than two dozen agreements with unions representing the city’s civilian employees, guaranteeing wage hikes of between 20 percent and 25 percent over five years. The contracts raised the minimum wage for city employees from $20 to $25 per hour and also contained rich benefits, including allowing workers to cash in 100 percent of their unused sick time when they retire—an increasingly rare perk in the private sector. An analysis by the city’s administrative officer said the deal would cost Los Angeles $3.5 billion over the life of the contracts. A similar multiyear deal with police unions was projected to add another $1 billion to costs.
Bass, who was on a trip to Ghana when fires erupted and began destroying the Los Angeles area, taking lives and burning buildings and homes to ashes, cut almost $20 million from the city’s budget for fire services for the current fiscal year, Breitbart News reported on Wednesday.
Some 39,622 acres have now burned as a result of the blazes as firefighters do their best on behalf of a stricken city:
Firefighters Seen Battling Blazes While Being Surrounded by Smoke and Ruins
As a result of the disastrous fires, Los Angeles residents are demanding that Bass be immediately recalled.
Their petition has as of Sunday reached 93,328 signatures, per Breitbart News.
