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One 12 months after a lethal blaze ripped by the Pacific Palisades and destroyed hundreds of properties, the union representing Los Angeles firefighters has launched a poll initiative that might elevate tons of of thousands and thousands of {dollars} for hearth management by boosting the town’s gross sales tax.
On Thursday, greater than a dozen firefighters with the United Firefighters of Los Angeles Metropolis Native 112 gathered in entrance of Hearth Station 58 in Crestview to launch a signature-gathering marketing campaign.
Income from the half-cent gross sales tax improve can be devoted to the Los Angeles Hearth Division, and would elevate cash for the development of recent stations, the hiring of extra firefighters and the acquisition of recent gear, organizers say.
“That is about preparedness,” mentioned Los Angeles Metropolis Councilmember Traci Park, a supporter of the initiative. “I, for one, can not let what occurred to my Pacific Palisades constituents occur to some other neighborhood.”
The poll measure would elevate the town gross sales tax from 9.75% to 10.25% and assist solidify a division price range that has been underfunded and under-invested in for greater than half a century, the firefighters union mentioned.
The proposed tax improve would carry in additional than $300 million yearly and can be earmarked particularly for the LAFD. Income, which might attain $10 billion by 2050, might construct 30 stations and improve the scale of the division by greater than 1,000 firefighters.
“We’ve got the identical variety of firefighters at present as we did within the Nineteen Sixties,” mentioned Doug Coates, the appearing president of UFLAC.
Coates mentioned the division has 42 fewer firefighters than it did when the Palisades hearth erupted and has fewer firefighters per 1,000 residents than the cities of Chicago, Houston, San Francisco and Seattle.
The gross sales tax would characterize the largest funding within the metropolis’s hearth division since 2000, when voters authorized Proposition F, a poll measure that approved the issuance of a $532 million bond — greater than half of which was allotted to construct 19 neighborhood hearth stations and a helicopter upkeep facility.
Mayor Karen Bass has additionally thrown her help behind the union’s poll measure.
“The town has confronted extraordinarily troublesome price range cycles. New income sources are wanted, and this poll initiative will assist make sure that we are able to construct out the Los Angeles Hearth Division to completely serve all Angelenos now and into the long run,” Bass mentioned in a ready assertion.
Bass beforehand informed The Occasions she has dedicated further sources to the division yearly she has been in workplace, noting that this 12 months’s price range included 17 further fleet upkeep positions, which might carry the division to its highest fleet upkeep staffing since 1995.
The division did face cuts throughout this 12 months’s budgeting course of, although its price range went up general. The town reduce the division’s Bureau of Variety, Fairness & Inclusion and likewise nixed the LAFD’s emergency incident technicians, who assist coordinate responses to fires. The emergency incident technicians had been reassigned to different positions within the division.
“This can be a nationwide problem,” mentioned Frank Lima, an LAFD firefighter who’s the overall secretary of the Worldwide Assn. of Hearth Fighters, the dad or mum group of UFLAC. “However the issues in Los Angeles are worse than I’ve seen in some other main American metropolis.”
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