City Finds Funding to Rescind Fire Cuts : Budget: Officials discover $40 million in unspent allocations. Rolling brownouts could end by Oct. 1.

Fire and emergency medical service cuts known as “rolling brownouts,” which have slowed response time throughout Los Angeles for most of the summer, could end by Oct. 1 because the city has found $40 million to restore staffing, city officials announced Wednesday.

Fire Chief Donald Manning and City Councilman Zev Yaroslavsky said $11 million in unspent department allocations discovered in reserve funds would enable the Los Angeles Fire Department to meet a 10% budget cutback ordered by the City Council in July.

The City Council is expected to vote as early as next week to have the money transferred to the Fire Department before the end of the month.

“We are now in a position to recommend to the full City Council and the mayor that the brownouts be ended Oct. 1,” Yaroslavsky said at a news conference. “I hope we never get into a brownout situation again.”

However, Yaroslavsky, chairman of the Budget and Finance Committee, warned, “The city is still in a fiscal crisis.

“The only reason we had the additional funds available is because since January we have been adhering to a strict hiring freeze,” he said, “and savings have accrued that we did not anticipate.”

The rest of the reserve will be used to offset a loss of $22 million a year in tax revenues resulting from a recent state Supreme Court ruling that the city cannot tax savings and loan companies, Yaroslavsky said.

The brownouts, which went into effect July 8, eliminated 13 engines and truck companies and six paramedic ambulances from some of the department’s 104 stations on a rotating basis for nine-day periods.

The cutbacks were required to help balance the city’s $3.9-billion budget in the face of a projected citywide deficit of more than $177 million.

But Fire Department officials warned that the rotating reductions of personnel and equipment would inevitably result in property damage and possibly loss of life--though that has not happened yet.

A preliminary study showed that the cuts have slowed response times for shootings, stabbings and automobile accidents by two minutes, by one minute for fires and by 36 seconds for heart attacks.

“We don’t have an incident in which we can say somebody died or was seriously injured because of the brownout,” Manning said. “But we’re playing Russian roulette--the chamber came up close but never came up right on the cartridge.”

Even with the additional funding, the 2,472-member department--which already has the lowest firefighter-to-population ratio of the nation’s six largest cities--will continue to operate on a “bare bones” budget, Yaroslavsky said.

“This is not a full restoration,” Yaroslavsky said. “The department will not be recruiting anyone this fiscal year . . . and some of the administrative and top-level jobs in the department that have been frozen will remain frozen.”

In the event the city’s budget problems do not ease, he added, “We will be in a position to go back into a brownout mode on a day’s notice if necessary.”

Meanwhile, Andy Fox, president of the United Firefighters Local 112 and an opponent of the brownout program said: “We’re ecstatic for firefighters and for the citizens of Los Angeles.

“There have been severe impacts on services and many near misses. Now, response time is going back to where it was, back up to 100%.”