One year after a deadly blaze ripped through the Pacific Palisades and destroyed thousands of homes, the union representing Los Angeles firefighters has launched a ballot initiative that would raise hundreds of millions of dollars for fire control by boosting the city’s sales tax.
On Thursday, more than a dozen firefighters with the United Firefighters of Los Angeles City Local 112 gathered in front of Fire Station 58 in Crestview to launch a signature-gathering campaign.
Revenue from the half-cent sales tax increase would be dedicated to the Los Angeles Fire Department, and would raise money for the construction of new stations, the hiring of more firefighters and the purchase of new equipment, organizers say.
“This is about preparedness,” said Los Angeles City Councilmember Traci Park, a supporter of the initiative. “I, for one, cannot let what happened to my Pacific Palisades constituents happen to any other community.”
The ballot measure would raise the city sales tax from 9.75% to 10.25% and help solidify a department budget that has been underfunded and under-invested in for more than half a century, the firefighters union said.
The proposed tax increase would bring in more than $300 million annually and would be earmarked specifically for the LAFD. Revenue, which would reach $10 billion by 2050, could build 30 stations and increase the size of the department by more than 1,000 firefighters.
“We have the same number of firefighters today as we did in the 1960s,” said Doug Coates, the acting president of UFLAC.
Coates said the department has 42 fewer firefighters than it did when the Palisades fire erupted and has fewer firefighters per 1,000 residents than the cities of Chicago, Houston, San Francisco and Seattle.
The sales tax would represent the biggest investment in the city’s fire department since 2000, when voters approved Proposition F, a ballot measure that authorized the issuance of a $532 million bond — more than half of which was allocated to build 19 neighborhood fire stations and a helicopter maintenance facility.
Mayor Karen Bass has also thrown her supported behind the union’s ballot measure.
“The city has faced extremely difficult budget cycles. New revenue sources are needed, and this ballot initiative will help ensure that we can build out the Los Angeles Fire Department to fully serve all Angelenos now and into the future,” Bass said in a prepared statement.
Bass said she had committed additional resources to the department every year she has been in office, noting that this year’s budget included 17 additional fleet maintenance positions, which would bring the department to its highest fleet maintenance staffing since 1995.
The department did face cuts during this year’s budgeting process, though its budget went up overall. The city cut the department’s Bureau of Diversity, Equity & Inclusion and also nixed the LAFD’s emergency incident technicians, who help coordinate responses to fires. The emergency incident technicians were reassigned to other positions in the department.
“This is a nationwide issue,” said Frank Lima, an LAFD firefighter who is the general secretary of the International Association of Fire Fighters, the parent organization of UFLAC. “But the problems in Los Angeles are worse than I’ve seen in any other major American city.”
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