In the end, it was the least-surprising firing of a subordinate by a mayor in the history of big-city government bureaucracies. Or plain-old bureaucracies of any kind.
When disaster strikes, the finger-pointing begins, and someone is going to take a fall. And it’s mostly not the boss who’s going down.
So after Pacific Palisades burned down in a horrific wildfire while Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass was on an overseas political trip, and after there were disagreements about both who was warned when about what, and about how many firefighters should be deployed when wildly dangerous winds are predicted, well, the inevitable happened. Bass fired Fire Chief Kristin Crowley last Friday, L.A.’s first woman mayor ousting the city’s first woman fire chief.
Was the Palisades the mayor’s fault, or was it the chief’s?
It was of course neither’s fault. It was the fault of the entire way we do things in California municipal governance — combined with the undeniable, perhaps unbeatable, force of nature that were the unprecedented wintertime Santa Ana winds of Jan. 7 that wreaked havoc throughout Los Angeles County.
Nature on that scale will win in the end. Which is not at all to say that people can’t respond to disaster in the most efficient way possible.
And inefficiencies abound when fire departments here and all around California choose to radically limit the personnel they can deploy because of the budget realities created by paying radically high salaries to uniformed firefighters. Yes, a firefighter III in L.A. city, which is anyone who has completed a year probationary period, makes $100,596–$118,055 annually. But we all know the story of the fire captain who made $613,000 in overtime two years ago. Many young firefighters could be hired for that — people who could have been deployed the night the fire destroyed one of the most desirable neighborhoods on Earth.
And, while all City Hall salaries are through the roof, the mayor did indeed recently choose to cut the Fire Department budget at least partially to pay for outrageous raises demanded by other city unions.
As we prepare to face future natural disasters, nothing short of a major revamping of how we do public safety is our first order of business.