More than 92,000 people have signed an online petition demanding the immediate resignation of Los Angeles mayor Karen Bass over her “gross mismanagement” of the devastating wildfires in the region.
The Change.org petition accuses Bass of mishandling the wildfires, noting she was not even in the country when the fires first broke out. Bass was 7,400 miles away in Ghana at the inauguration of the country’s president when the fires started raging on Tuesday.
“We . . . urgently call for the immediate recall of [Bass] due to her gross mismanagement and failure to effectively respond to the devastating 2025 fires in and around the city,” reads the petition, which was started Wednesday.
“Water supplies have been severely strained, billions of taxpayer dollars have been misallocated or left unaccounted for, and countless lives have been lost,” the petition adds.
“Families have been displaced, homes destroyed, and livelihoods shattered — yet Mayor Bass has been absent from the frontlines, choosing to travel abroad while her constituents suffer,” the petition adds.
Nearly 130,000 Californians have faced evacuation orders and at least 16 people had died as a result of the fires. Five wildfires remained active in Los Angeles County on Sunday, including Palisades, Eaton, Kenneth, Hurst and Archer. The Palisades fire has been the costliest in Los Angeles history.
Los Angeles Fire Department chief Kristin Crowley has accused the city of failing its people after firefighters ran out of water in some areas and faced weakened water pressure in others. State and local officials are investigating the situation.
“When a firefighter comes up to a hydrant, we expect there’s going to be water. We don’t control the water supply; our firefighters are there to protect lives and property and to make sure that we’re properly trained and equipped,” Crowley said. “That’s my position on this. If there’s no water, I don’t know how the water gets to the hydrants, please defer that [question] to [the L.A. Department of Water and Power (DWP)], or whomever controls that.”
Crowley said she was previously unaware that a large Pacific Palisades reservoir that is meant to hold up to 117 million gallons of water, was empty.
She also criticized the city for having cut the department’s budget by $17.6 million last year.
“Any budget cut is going to impact our ability to provide service,” Crowley said. “That is a ground truth in regard to our ability. If there’s a budget cut, we had to pull from somewhere else. What does that mean? That doesn’t get done or that there are delays.”
“Since Day One, we’ve identified huge gaps in regard to our service delivery and our ability of our firefighters’ boots on the ground to do their jobs,” she continued. “This is my third budget as we’re going into 2025–2026, and what I can tell you is we are still understaffed, we’re still under-resourced and we’re still underfunded.”
Bass has argued the budget cuts did not impact the firefighters’ ability to fight the raging wildfires.
“I think if you go back and look at the reductions that were made, there were no reductions that were made that would have impacted the situation that we were dealing with over the last couple of days,” she said. “And then there was a little bit of confusion because money was allocated to be distributed later on, which was actually going to support salaries and other parts of the fire department that were distributed a little later.”
“So I think it’s most important to understand that we were in tough budgetary times. Everybody knew that. But that impact of our budget really did not impact what we’ve been going through over the last few days,” Bass added.