With three Oakland fire stations closed because of the city’s $130 million budget deficit, the Oakland City Council somehow found enough money in the couch cushions to order those stations reopened sometime in the coming months.
With the City of Oakland reeling from a $130 million budget deficit, the city made the extremely dangerous-sounding early January decision to temporarily close two Oakland Fire Department stations and simply not reopen a third West Oakland fire station that had been closed for repairs. This obviously drew the exasperation of the fire department and many Oakland residents, considering the closures came at the height of the Los Angeles-area wildfires.
Under pressure, the Oakland City Council managed to find a workaround. NBC Bay Area reports that Oakland City Council unanimously voted to reopen all three fire stations at their Tuesday night meeting.
“I haven’t been this happy in a while,” Oakland Fire Department Chief Damon Covington told reporters Wednesday. “It’s been a long time coming. Lots of work went into this. We thank everyone who put in work behind the scenes to make this happen. It didn’t just happen overnight.”
“So many people put in hard work to find the money in the budget to open our fire houses,” he added.
So where’d that money come from? Oakland Councilmember Rebecca Kaplan’s office said in a just-released press statement that the newfound money is “new revenue from events, sports, and concerts at the Oakland Arena and Coliseum, and reduced expenditures on liabilities.”
There is no specific timeline for the stations’ reopenings. But Councilmember Janani Ramachandran told NBC Bay Area that all three stations were expected to reopen “in the coming weeks.”
Image: Oakland Fire Department via Facebook
