Furious Los Angeles firefighters have 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 wildfire wiping out large swathes of the city last 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 by half 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.
“When every second counts, someone is having a heart attack, someone is trapped in a car, someone cannot breathe,” he added.
The proposal now heads into the signature verification process.
City officials will conduct a random sample review over the next month to determine whether enough valid voter signatures were collected to place the measure on the November 2026 ballot.
If enough signatures qualify, the Los Angeles City Council would need to officially place the measure on the ballot by July 1.
“So as of today, we turned it in,” Ramirez said. “They do a random sampling, and it takes about 30 days.”
Firefighters say they launched the initiative after years of warning city leaders that staffing shortages, broken equipment and aging stations were pushing the department toward crisis levels.
“This sales tax is gonna give us more firefighters, rebuild our broken fire stations, build new fire stations, and also all the equipment that comes with it,” Ramirez said.
The push comes little more than a year after the devastating Palisades Fire exposed deep cracks in the city’s emergency response system.
But Ramirez said conditions inside the department have only deteriorated since then.
“You would think something that big happening to our city, we would have more firefighters and more ready apparatus,” he said. “But that is not true. We have less ready apparatus and less firefighters.”
According to Ramirez, 42 firefighter positions were eliminated within months of the fire.
The proposed measure would generate an estimated $324 million annually and includes restrictions requiring the money to flow directly into fire services rather than the city’s general fund.
“All the sales tax generated from this ballot measure goes straight into the fire department,” Ramirez said.
Now, firefighters who spend their days responding to deadly crashes, overdoses and fires are spending their off-duty hours fighting to convince voters the department itself needs saving.
“We know the safety of the citizens is in danger,” Ramirez said. “And if we don’t act now, it’s only gonna get worse.”
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