LA's Fire Sales Tax Is Passing With the Slimmest Margin of 8 Measures

Measure FD, at 53.7% in early returns, would raise the city sales tax to 10.75% and send about $345 million a year to the LAFD.

A nickel on every $10 purchase. That's what Measure FD adds at a Los Angeles cash register, and it's the city measure voters were least sure about.

All eight city measures on Tuesday's ballot were passing as of Wednesday, LAist reported, with the Associated Press estimating that about 67% of the vote had been counted. The half-cent sales tax for the Los Angeles Fire Department had the thinnest lead, 53.71% to 46.29%, in county registrar figures reported by MyNewsLA. The charter amendments ran as high as 78%.

Zev Yaroslavsky, who directs the Los Angeles Initiative at UCLA's Luskin School, called those amendments "non-controversial, but important," LAist reported. They mostly rearrange City Hall. Measure FD is the only one of the eight that raises a tax.

The city's own numbers are in the voter pamphlet. City Administrative Officer Matthew W. Szabo's financial impact statement says the rate goes from 10.25% to 10.75% and raises roughly $345 million a year. That money goes into a special fund that can only be spent on the LAFD: staff, engines, stations and brush clearance. The tax has no end date. It stays until voters repeal it.

The Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association, which opposed the measure, ran the math the other way in its pamphlet rebuttal. Split across roughly 4 million residents, it said, that's more than $86 a person a year. It would also be the third sales tax hike in two years, LAist noted. Measure A took the city's rate to 9.75% in 2024, and Measure ER pushed it to 10.25% in October.

So why is 53.7% enough? The California Constitution normally requires two-thirds of voters to approve a tax earmarked for one purpose. The firefighters' union went around the City Council and gathered more than 225,000 signatures instead, and a tax that qualifies by petition needs only a simple majority, according to LAist. The opponents called that a loophole judges opened in 2017. At the current count, Measure FD sits about 13 points short of two-thirds.

The union and Fire Chief Jaime Moore argued in the pamphlet that the money would pay for at least 1,000 more firefighters and paramedics. The union says the department now has about 3,400 firefighters in 106 stations, roughly where it stood in the 1960s. "The opponents say to tell city leaders to get their priorities straight," the firefighters wrote in their rebuttal. "We've told them for 60 years."

The measure doesn't let City Hall off the hook, though. It sets a floor: the LAFD's average slice of discretionary spending over the decade before the tax kicks in, and the city's own budgets can't drop the department below it. In any year the city falls short, the impartial summary says, it can't collect the tax.

L.A. County is scheduled to certify the results by Nov. 27. If the lead holds, the first nickel shows up at the register as early as April 1, 2027. After that, it keeps coming only in years when the council keeps funding the department with its own money.

Source: LAist, retrieved November 5, 2026. Other sources: mynewsla.com, election.org, LAist (2).