Los Angeles City Fire Commission

Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa named two political supporters and an administrative law judge to the Los Angeles Fire Commission on Friday, rounding out his appointments to a panel that has been wrestling with allegations of racial bias in the department.

The closure of six emergency rooms in Los Angeles over the last 18 months has increased the time it takes paramedics to get patients to hospitals, the Los Angeles Fire Department said Monday. Fewer emergency rooms means paramedics must sometimes drive farther to deliver patients and scramble to find facilities that can accept them, officials said. The average drive time for Los Angeles paramedics as of March 2004 was eight minutes and 23 seconds, the lowest it had been in several years.

Studio City resident, business leader and Valley activist David W. Fleming has been reelected president of the Los Angeles City Fire Commission, the city panel that oversees the Fire Department. A 1991 recipient of the Fernando Award, a Valley tribute for volunteerism, Fleming became the commission's leader in August 1995. The five-member commission unanimously elected Fleming this week to his second one-year term.