The devastating wildfires in Los Angeles have spotlighted questionable state and local government policies in California that may have contributed to the blazes and left areas like Hollywood vulnerable due to insufficient firefighting resources. 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 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.
Bass took office in December 2022 after a surprisingly close race against real estate developer Rick Caruso, a Republican who had switched to the Democratic Party. A Los Angeles Times poll showed that Caruso did well among voters viewing the economy and public safety as key issues; Bass dominated among voters who prioritized climate change and “coalition building.” 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.
The new contracts were the largest, in percentage terms, given to city employees since 2007, when then-mayor Antonio Villaraigosa delivered pay raises amounting to 25 percent over five years. Coming just before the 2008 Wall Street crisis crashed the economy, those contracts helped to blow a huge hole in Los Angeles’s budget—leading to the elimination of thousands of jobs and shrinking investment in basic services. Critics warned that something similar might occur following the 2024 contracts, which could drain the city’s fiscal reserves.
It took just months for those fears to materialize. This time it wasn’t a Wall Street meltdown that busted the budget but a series of unanticipated expenses related to judgments against the city in personal-injury negligence cases arising from dangerous conditions, such as broken sidewalks and inadequate streetlighting, as well as judgments against the police. Under normal circumstances, Los Angeles should have been able to absorb those costs, but its reserves had dropped below acceptable levels, and paying the liability cases without additional revenues or budget cuts would have been enough to force the city council to declare a fiscal emergency. In response, Bass cut the city’s budget to $12.9 billion, down from $13.1 billion the previous year. This involved making reductions in some 20 areas, including a cut of $17.6 million in the fire department—the steepest decline in any area except street services, where Bass reduced spending by $21 million.
“The city is living beyond its means,” the editorial board of the Los Angeles Times noted at the time, adding that the problem was “self-inflicted.” For Angelenos hoping the city would invest in infrastructure—“smoothing busted sidewalks, fixing burned-out streetlights, trimming trees, or any other public improvements”—those hopes seemed unlikely to be realized. Critics also faulted the administration for how it handled union negotiations that led to the budget-busting contracts. Most of the talks were conducted in secret, with little public discussion of the costly perks included in the agreements until they were finalized.
California’s latest bout of horrific fires will reopen debate about the state government’s failures to address a deadly problem. California’s decades-long resistance to boosting its water-storage capacity—what Victor Davis Hanson has described as “the scorching of California”—will face new scrutiny. The state’s land-management practices, which incoming President Trump has already criticized, will provoke more controversy. Los Angeles’s water-management system, lambasted by former mayoral candidate Caruso—formerly a commissioner of the city’s Department of Water and Power—for running dry in some neighborhoods during the current fires, will require new investment. Questions will linger, too, over how much difference the $17.6 million cut by Mayor Bass from the city’s fire department might have made.
What is beyond dispute is that Los Angeles and the surrounding area have a long history of wildfires, including in recent years. That threat didn’t seem to be much of a priority in Karen Bass’s budget.
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