LA fires: Mayor ousts fire chief amid feuding over Palisades inferno

With tensions rising over the response to the most destructive firestorm in city history, Mayor Karen Bass on Friday dismissed Los Angeles’s fire chief, accusing her of not properly preparing her agency ahead of a blaze that leveled thousands of buildings and left the region reeling.

Bass said the ousting of Kristin Crowley was “in the best interest of Los Angeles public safety” and that the chief had failed to deploy adequately in advance of last month’s devastating wildfire, which tore through the Pacific Palisades neighborhood on the city’s west side - the first of two infernos that would together eventually burn more than 16,000 buildings and claim at least 29 lives across the county. Crowley, Bass said, then refused to conduct an after-action investigation into the disaster response.

“These actions required her removal,” Bass said in a Friday afternoon news conference, flanked by four members of the Los Angeles City Council and the new interim chief Ronnie Villanueva, a department veteran.

Crowley’s removal is the culmination of weeks of recriminations and comes as Bass scrambles to control the fallout from the city’s fire response, which has quickly become the biggest test of her long political career. The mayor sought to project confidence in the department’s new direction and said she was heartened by the brisk pace of fire cleanup.

“The city is not in upheaval,” she said.

With scrutiny of city officials mounting, the relationship between the two leaders had been openly deteriorating. On Thursday, Bass blamed Crowley for not sufficiently warning the mayor’s office of the coming weather risk in early January, as Bass prepared for a trip to Ghana.

Bass, despite increasingly dire public forecasts of dangerous wind conditions, took the trip anyway and has since faced considerable criticism for that decision, which placed her out of the country when the fires first broke out.

“What has happened in the two-plus years I’ve been here, every time there was a weather emergency - or even a hint of a weather emergency - the chief has called me directly. She has my cellphone, she knows she can call me 24/7,” Bass said on Friday. “That did not happen this time.”

Earlier this week, Bass told reporters that she regretted being so far from the city during a time of crisis, but she said she would not have traveled if Crowley had alerted her to the potential risks.

The feud between Bass and Crowley has been simmering for more than a month, dating back to at least Jan. 10, just days after the fire began. Then, in back-to-back television interviews, the chief said the Bass administration had failed the fire department, accusing city leaders of underfunding the critical agency. The situation, Crowley said, was “no longer sustainable.”

The comments, and a lengthy meeting with Bass that followed, sparked rumors that Crowley had been let go. The mayor’s office and the fire department rushed to quell the discord, and each issued statements claiming the two were committed to working together on the disaster response.

“As you see here, the chief and I are lockstep,” Bass said, appearing alongside Crowley at a news conference one day after the chief’s interviews.

On Friday, Bass said her decision to fire Crowley came now because “I was not going to do anything while we were in a state of emergency” and because she only recently learned that the chief was refusing to conduct an after-action probe. Such reports are required by state code.

Bass said Crowley did not give her a reason for her stance. A spokesperson for the fire department did not respond to a request for comment.

Genethia Hudley-Hayes, president of the Los Angeles fire commission - a five-person civilian board appointed by the mayor and confirmed by the city council to oversee the fire department - said in an interview that she was shocked when Crowley told her she would not participate in an after-action report.

“It is the last thing that we need,” Hudley-Hayes said. “It is her responsibility under code to do this for the city, and she refused to do so.”

She said she met with Crowley on Tuesday to discuss the chief’s plans for the inquiry. Crowley told Hudley-Hayes that Los Angeles County, which operates a separate fire department, was not planning to do an after-action report, so she was “following the lead” of the county, the fire commission president said. A spokesperson for the county fire department did not immediately answer questions about whether that agency would be doing its own after-action report.

“I have never seen this happen before,” Hudley-Hayes said. “There have always been these after-action incident reviews done. This is just standard procedure that is done, and I’ve never known any fire chief saying, ‘I have no intention of doing a review of my department.’”

Even so, Bass’s announcement rankled some city officials and fire personnel. The city’s firefighter union, the United Firefighters of Los Angeles City, said in a statement that its members “strongly oppose” Crowley’s termination. Others - including city lawmakers - said the firing was an attempt by Bass to shift attention away from her own failings.

“I am outraged by the scapegoating revealed by the Mayor’s actions,” Monica Rodriguez, a Los Angeles city council member, wrote in a statement. “I plan to use my authority as a council member to set the record straight and encourage Chief Crowley to appeal the Mayor’s baseless termination to the City Council.”

The city council may overturn Crowley’s dismissal if 10 of its 15 members vote to do so, an effort that is unlikely to succeed. Four council members stood behind Bass as she announced the shake-up, and the mayor said she believes she has “a lot” of support in the chamber.

Rick Caruso, a prominent Los Angeles developer who ran against Bass for mayor in 2022 and has been one of her most vocal critics in recent weeks, said the decision to fire Crowley was “very disappointing.”

“Chief Crowley served Los Angeles well and spoke honestly about the severe and profoundly ill-conceived budget cuts the Bass administration made to the LAFD,” Caruso said in a statement. “That courage to speak the truth was brave, and I admire her. Honesty in a high city official should not be a firing offense.”

The state of the department’s budget has been the subject of much criticism, but the full picture is more complicated than Crowley and Caruso laid out. Bass initially approved a budget of more than $814 million for the 2024-2025 budget year, which was about $23 million less than the year prior, a difference that inspired outrage in the fires early days.

But that initial figure did not include funds for salary increases and vehicle replacement, which were approved in a separate account. A document shared with The Washington Post showed that overall funding for the fire department in the 2024-2025 fiscal year actually increased by $80 million, or 9.1 percent.

Following her removal, Crowley - who was appointed to her post in 2022 and was the first woman to lead the department - elected to stay with the agency at a lower rank, a right she can exercise under local civil service rules.

The new interim chief, Villanueva, retired just seven months ago after 41 years with the agency. Villanueva, whose last post was chief deputy of emergency operations, will be charged with restoring trust in the department while the city conducts a national search for a permanent replacement.

“I just plan on moving forward,” Villanueva told reporters on Friday. “I want to move the department forward and take care of our firefighters. I don’t want to look to the past, like the mayor has stated. I just want to look to the future.”

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