FuriousLos Angeles firefightershave dumped hundreds of thousands of signatures on City Hall, demanding it raises sales taxes to cover chronic shortages across the Los Angeles Fire Department.
LAFD bosses have warned for months they are desperately overstretched with a massive cash shortfall, and some staff are even going unpaid while pulling mammoth 48-hour shifts fighting the flames.
But in her budget last month,Mayor Karen Bass refused to raise their funding, despite a deadly wildfirewiping out large swathes of the citylast year.
Dozens of firefighters on Tuesday morning turned up at the City Clerk’s office and handed over boxes stashed with 200,000 signatures for a ballot measure to hike the city’s sales tax.
They want to bring the tax up byhalf a cent to fund more firefighters, ambulances, fire trucks, and fix up crumbling, decades-old stations.
Firefighters say the campaign has become a last-ditch attempt to stop response times from slipping even further in the second-largest city in the US.
Rich Ramirez, vice president of United Firefighters of Los Angeles City Local 112, told the California Post: “We have the same amount of firefighters as we did in 1960, with the call volume five times greater.
In 1960, Los Angeles firefighters responded to about 100,000 calls annually.
Today, crews are hit with more than 500,000 emergency calls a year while protecting a city that has nearly doubled in population. At the same time response times are worsening.
Ramirez continued: “We should be responding within four and a half minutes. We are almost at eight minutes when they call 911.
Source: California Post – Breaking California News, Photos & Videos
