Police vs. firefighters: Bitter $350M tax war erupts after years of LA City Hall failures

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Police officers vs. firefighters. It’s not the annual softball game. It’s a serious political fight over a proposed half-cent per dollar sales tax in the city of LA.

The LA firefighters union, United Firefighters of Los Angeles City Local 112 (UFLAC), has put a 0.5% sales tax increase on the November ballot. The initiative is called Measure FD. 

This is not about a union looking for more cash to benefit its members. The fact is that the LA Fire Department (LAFD) has been woefully understaffed and underfunded for several years. 

Measure FD could raise almost $350 million each year — over a third of today’s firefighting budget — for equipment and services.

It should not be necessary. But the mayor and the City Council have mismanaged LA’s money and emergency services so badly that firefighters are reduced to begging taxpayers for help.

Now Angelenos could end up paying more taxes because their money wasn’t spent properly in the first place.

In the year before the Palisades Fire on Jan. 7, 2025, LA spent more on homeless services than it did on firefighting. 

It’s one of the reasons that firefighters were not adequately deployed ahead of the fire: The LAFD brass allegedly didn’t want to pay overtime.

The lack of funds also likely affected the LAFD’s decision to roll up their hoses and leave the scene of the Lachman Fire on Jan. 2. 

That fire erupted on New Year’s Day, just after midnight, allegedly after being set by an arsonist. The LAFD put it out within hours, but when firefighters came back the next day for “mop up” operations, they apparently left before the job was completely done, because of budget concerns.

You know the rest: The high winds of Jan. 7 reignited the Lachman Fire as the Palisades Fire.

And once the Palisades Fire was burning, the department was short of engines to send into the blaze. The LAFD chief, who was later fired, said that dozens of fire engines were down for repair, and that the department lacked maintenance staff.

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Another explanation: The LAFD didn’t lack maintenance staff, but relied on old engines that break down.

Whatever the reason, the root cause was the same: a lack of funding. 

The firefighters decided to do something about it.

Rather than waiting for City Hall to change its ways, the men and women of the LAFD decided to put a tax increase on the ballot to fund their own department. Not for pensions, but for operating costs.

Many of them donated their own time and money to the campaign.

What they didn’t count on was opposition from their brothers and sisters in uniform.

The LA Police Protective League (LAPPL), the union that represents members of the LA Police Department (LAPD), opposes Measure FD.

The police union has been careful to say that its officers don’t oppose firefighters having a bigger budget. However, they do not agree that raising a new, permanent tax is the right way to do it. 

You can see their point.

Voters in LA County just approved a half-cent per dollar sales tax increase in June, raising the baseline local sales tax to a staggering 10.25%. If Measure FD passes, residents of the city of LA will be paying 10.75%.

That means sales taxes will hit their limit under state law. If the city needs to raise funds in an emergency, it will not be able to do so. 

And higher sales taxes will add to the cost of living, which is already far too high in LA. Residents and businesses will continue to leave, or shop elsewhere, meaning the city will lose some of the revenue it is trying to raise.

Instead of hiking sales taxes, LAPPL says the city should address the LAFD funding shortfall through the ordinary budget processes.

Of course, if the mayor and city council were interested in doing that, they would have done so long ago already.

The tragedy is that neither Mayor Karen Bass nor City Councilwoman Nithya Raman is likely to give the LAFD what it needs to function properly.

Raman’s extreme party, the Democratic Socialists of America-Los Angeles, doesn’t even mention firefighting in its manifesto. It just talks about “climate change.”

So it’s police vs. fire in a war over taxpayers’ money. 

In a city that had anything like basic, competent management, both the LAPD and LAFD would be fully funded.

The LAPD only has about 8,500 officers, short of the 12,500 that Chief Jim McDonnell says it needs.

And the firefighters want Measure FD to pay for 1,000 new LAFD hires.

These aren’t absurd numbers. They are achievable, without new taxes, if the city stops throwing away billions of dollars on hotel rooms for homeless people.

But that would require leadership, something we don’t have yet. Not this year, anyway.

Joel Pollak is Opinion editor at the California Post.