The Los Angeles City Council has rejected former fire chief Christine Crowley’s bid to regain his job of leading one of the nation’s largest fire departments over fierce objections from the firefighters’ union.
The council voted 13-2 for Crawley’s reinstatement on Tuesday, handing Mayor Karen Bass a much-needed political victory and a presentation of support from the city’s legislative department. The bus was in Ghana when the Palisade fire broke out. She left Council President Marchece Harris Dawson as acting mayor and gave a choppy performance within days of her return.
Crowley used Tuesday’s hearing to publicly retreat for the first time against the arguments Base provided to end her. Sitting in front of the council, she also claimed she was facing retaliation for publicly highlighting the lack of resources in her department.
“The truth is that fire chiefs should not be punished or punished because they are openly and honestly about the needs and capabilities of the LAFD, or do their best to protect firefighters and the community,” she told the council.
Councillor Imelda Padilla, representing the Central San Fernando Valley, criticized Crowley for her decision to discuss the fire department’s budget with news media while the Pallisard fire is still escalating.
“The Chief chose the wrong time and the wrong place to raise the issue,” she said.
It was pretty certain that Crowley’s bid for recovery would almost certainly fail, given the fact that it would require 10 votes, or two-thirds of the majority. The only votes to support her return came from councillors Monica Rodriguez and Traci Park. Both were Crawley supporters.
Nevertheless, Tuesday’s minutes produced a base headache that kicked Crowley out as chief almost two weeks ago. Firefighters repeatedly aired complaints that the fire department was too long due to inadequate funding.
Chuongho, who works for the United Firefighters Board of 112 Los Angeles City Local, urged council members to revive Crawley and said he was fired to “tell the truth” about the fire department’s lack of resources.
“The men and women from our great fire station will support the Crowley Chief as she stood up, she spoke and she had our back,” he said. “In my career, the fire chief has never spoken consistently about the constant staffing and lack of funds at our fire department.”
Crowley’s complaint, filed Thursday, added to the sense of volatility that has involved city halls since the fire broke out on Jan. 7, destroying thousands of homes and killing 12 people. For more than a week, Crawley’s supporters have accused the bus of scapegoating the fire chief and accusing her of using her layoff to distract her from liability.
Bus supporters accused Crawley of negligence and settlement, and of seeking some of the reinstatement of a much larger political attack on Bass, the city’s first black female mayor.
“As we are about to turn the corner, at this point in time of the crisis, we are seeing a divisive political movement… Please do the public lynching of Los Angeles’ first African-American mayor,” said Sylvia Castillo, who worked for bases during the mayors of Congress, according to her Rinkedin page.
Castillo, who appeared before the council, said the bus had the authority to remove the chief for “negligence of duty.” Another base supporter said the push to get Crawley back was “rooted in anti-blackness.”
Benjamin Torres, president and CEO of South LA-based Group CD Tech, called the minutes “a political move to shut down black leaders.”
“This will not be done [Bass] He told the council.
Bass fired Crawley on February 21, citing two main reasons. She said the chief failed to deploy as many as 1,000 firefighters in the morning in advance. She also accused Crawley of refusing to take part in the post-action report after being asked to do so.
Bass began publicly criticizing Crowley for the days leading up to her expulsion, accusing the former chief of not warning her of possible danger before the fire.
The Crowley defender accused Bass of trying to change liability well before the completion of the after-action report, which would have evaluated Palisades’ fire preparations and response. They said the mayor’s own staff had received increasingly disastrous warnings from the city’s emergency management department tracking dangerous weather conditions about the rising wind and wildfire situation.
Rodriguez, who represents the Northeast San Fernando Valley, said that Crawley was unfairly made a scapegoat by the mayor, desperately trying to reset herself to her own administration after the wildfire. She said she didn’t oppose the argument that Bass had the authority to fire Crawley.
However, she retorted that under the authority provided by the city’s charter, the city council has its own authority to overturn such actions by 10 votes.
“We also have a role, so we exercise that role,” she told her colleagues. “And I’m not going to apologise for doing my job.”
Tensions between Crowley and bass appeared publicly in the first week of the Palisade fire. On January 10, Crawley went to multiple television stations and accused her of explaining that she lacked appropriate funds from her agency.
In one interview, she said the city had failed to do with her and her department. In the other, she drew a link between cutting into the department and handling of the city’s fire.
The Firefighters Union praised Crowley as the teller of truth. It’s someone who has the courage to call on their agents to invest for decades. Bass responded by summoning Crowley, which lasted so long that the mayor missed her own press conference and updated the public with a wildfire.
Many people were hoping that Crawley would be fired, but Bass showed up the next morning with the fire chief and said the two were working together.
That messaging changed suddenly two weeks ago. The bus began to criticize Crawley for not warning her about the possible extreme fire conditions.
“Chief Crowley had the courage and courage to ensure that the troops on the ground did what they needed to do their job,” said Freddie Escobar, president of the Firefighters Union. “For the first time, the public and this city council began to pay attention, but her honesty cost her work.”
The city’s charter gives the mayor the authority to remove most department heads, including the fire chiefs, without council approval. The Charter also gives Crawley the right to appeal the decision to the Council.
While Tuesday’s minutes look virtually unprecedented in modern city history, the closest parallel is the highly publicized version of Bernard C. Parks, a second term as police chief in 2002.
The city council refused to overturn the committee’s decision amid a debate that inflamed the city’s racial division. Three black members of the council flanked against the park’s ally, the second black chief in the department, and against the fight-injured Hearn. Parks won a seat on the council the following year, and Hearn lost his re-election in 2005.
When Parks fought for his second term, Councillor Tim Makosker, who was Hahn’s Chief of Staff, said he didn’t want to force two people he didn’t get along with (Base and Crawley). He went through it and said, “You can do something miserable.”
“I’m going to put a functional city in something more politically convenient for me,” Makosker said.
Traci Park, a district councillor that includes Pacific Palisade, supported the move to revive Crowley. Neither she nor her colleagues have received after-action reports showing who will blame the head of the firefighters, lack of water in firefighters, and lack of order evacuation.
Getting those answers “may mean firing everyone who is negligent in multiple departments. That’s fine,” Park said. But I would not do that without informed records and actual evidence to support that decision. And I don’t have it today. ”
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