The LA Fires And The Homeless-Industrial Complex

As I follow the unfolding scandal of the LA fires, the issue that begins to stand out is the reduction of resources to the Los Angeles City Fire Department, for instance:

In a preliminary budget request for 2025/26, signed by Fire Chief Kristin Rowley, made on October 29, the LAFD asked for $96,535,000 to fund a 'fleet replacement plan'.

. . . The firefighting force said in its request to the city: 'Many vehicles have surpasses their expected service life, leading to increased maintenance costs, reduces parts availability and potential downtime.'

And in its formal proposal to the city in November, it requested $24,063,000 for 'new fleet/apparatus purchases'.

In the preliminary budget request, the LAFD also asked for more than $1.9million to restore 16 maintenance positions 'deleted' in last year's budget.

It said in its request: 'The positions support fleet maintenance, equipment engineering, purchasing and warehouse management and distribution.'

. . . While the fire department's budget steadily grew from from $674.27 million in 2019 to $819.64 million in 2025, this year it faced a significant fall from $837.19 million in 2024.

In a December memo, Crowley said the cut of $17.6million 'adversely affected the Department’s ability to maintain core operations, such as technology and communication infrastructure, payroll processing, training, fire prevention, and community education.'

. . . A leaked memo last week revealed that Karen Bass had demanded the LAFD make an additional $49million budget cut, on top of the $17.6million cut.

The extra cuts, requested just days before fires broke out and devastated swathes of Los Angeles, would have shut down 16 fire stations and crippled the department's ability to respond to emergencies, sources previously told DailyMail.com.

There's also the unanswered question of why the Santa Ynez Reservoir had been empty and under repair since 2022, when a mandated update was supposed to have been finished in 2012, which I covered in this post. The LA Department of Water and Power's explanation completely glosses over this extended tmeline:

In a memo posted by the LADWP attempting to combat misinformation regarding water supply, they clarified that “LADWP was required to take the Santa Ynez Reservoir out of service to meet safe drinking water regulations,” but stated that “water supply remained strong to the area.”

But the safe drinking water updates were supposed to have been finsihed in 2012, while the reservoir has been in and out of service over a dozen years since then. This sounds as though the LADWP's budget is being squeezed just as much as the fire department. Where is this money going?

The best answer I've heard is from Alex Villanueva, who was LA County Sheriff from 2018 to 2022. Villanueva, although a Democrat, was also a Trump-style populist who during his tenure took an increasing interest in the homeless problem. In particular, he took on homeless encampments in places like Venice Beach, whose local city councilman had advocated pro-encampment policies:

When it comes to law enforcement in Venice, the Los Angeles Police Department has long been the agency in charge.

But now Los Angeles County Sheriff Alex Villanueva is sending deputies in to patrol the boardwalk and beach in an effort to crack down on Venice's growing homelessness problem.

And it's sparking an ugly political spat.

That prompted a series of angry tweets from Los Angeles City Councilmember Mike Bonin, who called Villanueva a "roadblock" to progress, accused him of exploiting the homeless for political gain, and called the effort a PR blitz promising Villanueva's "notorious brand of justice."

"The city of LA created this problem," Villanueva said Monday in Venice. "This is a failure of leadership from the very top."

As LA County Sheriff, Villanueva insisted he had legal authority over law enforcement anywhere in the county, whether or not, as in this case, LAPD was also responsible, and if LAPD wasn't going to act, the sheriff's office would. Villanueva also pointed out that the sheriff is a separately elected official, and he doesn't take orders from any other politicians.

In effect, Villanueva was taking on the county and state machine, which promptly found a candidate to run against him in the 2022 election, and Villanueva was defeated. But he's continued to make his point: the homeless problem exists because politicians make money off it:

Over the past decade, $6.5 billion has been spent trying to solve Los Angeles County’s homelessness crisis. However, instead of decreasing, its homeless population has increased to nearly 70,000 from its 2011 total of 39,000, according to last year’s point-in-time count.

The worsening of the issue can be partially attributed to it being profitable for many organizations and individuals, Alex Villanueva, former Los Angeles County Sheriff, said in a recent Epoch Time’s California Insider interview.

“They’re not doing anything about it because the homeless industrial complex is alive and well,” he said.

According to Villanueva, many nonprofit organizations receive county funding to help solve the issue, but there are no clear guidelines on how such funding should be used.

“There’s no governance, there’s no oversight, there’s no accountability on the results. [The county] just keeps shoveling money at them, and the problem keeps getting worse and worse,” he said.

Unfortunately, Mayor Bass is on board with the homeless-industrial complex:

For the 2023-2024 fiscal year, Los Angeles budgeted $837 million for the Los Angeles Fire Department (LAFD), which was roughly 65% the size of the homeless budget of $1.3 billion.

An analysis by L.A.'s city comptroller last year found that roughly half the budget for homelessness went unspent.

Bass had proposed a larger budget cut to the LAFD, about $23 million, but it was not adopted.

This is where the fire department's budget, as well as related projects like the dormant Santa Ynez Reservoir, is going. I can only surmise that the homeless budget, which is comparable to the City's in in LA County and supported in part by a sales tax increment, is embedded with local politicians because there's a skim -- some amount of this multibillion-dollar expenditure is kicked back to the politicians themselves. This is inevitably going to come out as the federal budget battles heat up. It can't happen soon enough.