Dozens of cities and counties sue fire truck makers over soaring costs, delivery delays

In the summer of 2023, a third of the fire engines owned by the fire department in Kansas City, Kansas, were unusable. Five of 15 pumper trucks were out of commission, and the department was waiting on parts from the manufacturer.

So Kansas City fire officials went on a nationwide hunt for trucks. But their frantic search turned up just four they could buy immediately, and the vehicles were designed for smaller, more rural departments.

Their experience was not unusual: Municipalities and fire departments in every state are struggling with soaring prices and years-long delivery times for trucks. It’s a crisis many cities and departments lay squarely at the feet of the country’s biggest fire apparatus manufacturers.

“There must come a day of reckoning when the manufacturers of our most important tools are held accountable for runaway pricing and extended delivery times,” Dennis Rubin, the chief of the Kansas City Fire Department, told U.S. senators last fall at hearing convened to investigate price increases and delivery delays on fire trucks.

Kansas City is one of more than 60 cities, counties and fire departments across the nation — from Milwaukee to San Diego, Pittsburgh to Tampa — that say the country’s three biggest fire truck manufacturers have conspired to suppress competition, resulting in skyrocketing prices for fire trucks and repair parts, and yearslong manufacturing delays.

In April, a federal court rolled up their claims into a trio of antitrust class action lawsuits in a Wisconsin district court.

The defendants are fire apparatus manufacturers REV Group Inc., Oshkosh Corporation and Rosenbauer Group, along with some of their subsidiaries and related companies, as well as their trade group, the Fire Apparatus Manufacturers’ Association.

Des Moines sues fire truck companies, alleging ‘parasitic’ pricing, anti-trust violations

By some estimates, the three manufacturers together control 70-80% of the U.S. fire truck market. Fire engine prices have nearly doubled since 2020, from about $589,000 to over $1 million, according to the International Association of Fire Fighters.

Fire departments also are reporting extended wait times for new fire trucks. In 2024, officials with the Seattle Fire Department noted it took more than four years to replace a ladder truck — a process that had previously taken just a year.

And some departments are accusing manufacturers of charging them “floating prices” that increase soon before a truck is ready to be delivered. The president of a volunteer fire department in Delaware County, Pennsylvania, said his department paid a 50% deposit on a fire truck and the supplier later said it could no longer deliver at that price, leading to the department paying an additional $110,000, reported the Pennsylvania Capital-Star.

“By hiking prices for trucks and replacement parts without competition, the defendants have made it harder for the city of Pittsburgh and other municipalities across the country to make the required investments in lifesaving services and put the burden back on our communities,” Pittsburgh Mayor Corey O’Connor said in a July statement announcing its antitrust lawsuit. A city representative declined to comment further.

The plaintiffs in the suit assert that manufacturers worked together to throttle the production of fire trucks nationwide and minimize competition to increase prices. Many cities and fire departments also allege the Fire Apparatus Manufacturers’ Association — the industry’s primary trade group — helped the manufacturers coordinate price increases and limit production by passing secret or proprietary data between them.

Dan Meyer, vice president of sales at Pierce Manufacturing, a subsidiary of Oshkosh, has said his company has worked to expand its manufacturing capabilities and hired more workers. REV Group did not respond to Stateline’s request for comment.

Some states, too, have recently jumped into the fray.

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, a Republican, launched an investigation in February into potential anticompetitive conduct of the same three manufacturers, after hearing complaints from Texas cities and their fire departments. His office said it had already uncovered “multiple potentially unlawful price hikes” involving Texas fire departments.

California has also filed an antitrust suit, asserting that REV Group and its former private equity owner, American Industrial Partners, created monopolies in fire truck markets. In Pennsylvania, state Rep. Jennifer O’Mara, a Democrat, held a hearing in her district in March, proposing future legislation to address the issue.

And Congress is getting involved. In July, U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren, a Massachusetts Democrat, and U.S. Sen. Jim Banks, an Indiana Republican, along with Democratic Rep. Becca Balint of Vermont and Republican Rep. Ben Cline of Virginia, filed a resolution directing the Federal Trade Commission to investigate the consolidation in the fire truck manufacturing industry.

The resolution comes on the heels of a 2025 Senate investigation, launched by Warren and Banks, into the effects of private equity rollups in the fire truck manufacturing industry.

At local, state and even federal levels, there’s a bipartisan appetite for antitrust enforcement, said Basel Musharbash, an attorney who represents some of the cities involved in the class action suit, including Little Rock, Kansas City and Las Vegas.

“You can look at any number of industries that supply things to municipalities and you’ll see the same dynamic,” he said, pointing to consolidation in the ambulance industry, public works and public transit buses.

“Across the economy, there’s no shortage of industries where we’re seeing decision-making and control being concentrated in the hands of a few executives at a few companies, and that’s just inconsistent with American’s views about freedom and markets and democracy.”

Attracting investors

Last fall, the Garden City Fire Department in rural Garden City, Kansas, had been waiting nearly two years for the two new fire trucks it had ordered for one of its fire stations. The department serves all of Finney County, an agricultural area in the southwest part of the state.

Without the new trucks, the department was moving trucks around from its other stations to try to fill the void, and using three aging backup vehicles — the oldest was built in 1989; the newest in 2006 — that had a host of repair issues and few or no safety features.

Pa. fire companies feel the pinch as private equity buys up truck manufacturers 

Fire truck manufacturers rely on cities, counties and other local and state governments to purchase their products — and that steady flow of public funding has proven attractive to investors.

A decade ago, private equity firm American Industrial Partners began buying fire truck manufacturers around the country, eventually rolling them up into one conglomerate called the REV Group. As it consolidated smaller companies, it also shut down some of its manufacturing plants even as fire truck orders climbed after federal pandemic assistance dollars flowed to state and local governments, said Musharbash.

REV Group may control as much as 40% of the market now, he said, with Oshkosh subsidiary Pierce Manufacturing controlling around 25-30% and Rosenbauer a smaller piece.

In 2024, REV Group’s private equity fund owner, American Industrial Partners, divested from its fire truck conglomerate, and the other companies are publicly traded. But they’ve boosted profits through private equity-like tactics, he said.

For example, Los Angeles County and other municipalities say that Oshkosh, a publicly traded company, boosts its profits partly by requiring customers of Pierce Manufacturing to purchase only Pierce proprietary parts, despite cheaper prices available from competitors.

Draining public dollars

In Providence, Rhode Island, city officials purchased three pumper trucks in 2021 from Oshkosh subsidiary Pierce Manufacturing for $449,159 per truck. In 2024, when the city bought five more, the cost had jumped more than 63% to $734,320, officials said in court filings. Those trucks won’t be delivered until next year.

Fire chiefs, industry watchers and local officials hope the FTC will commission a study to dig into the industry to better understand why smaller manufacturers are having a hard time entering the industry.

“In an industry like fire trucks, where you’ve seen skyrocketing prices, backlogs, deteriorating quality over a period of more than half a decade, we should be seeing a large number of new manufacturers cropping up,” Musharbash said. “We should see smaller manufacturers expanding, and yet that’s not happening.”

Musharbash said cities and local lawmakers should reexamine how they purchase fire trucks, ambulances, city transit buses and other equipment manufactured by big corporations.

“There are these rackets in these industries that local governments depend on, and they’re draining dollars out of municipal budgets and state budgets. It’s a huge waste of public funds.”

This story has been updated to include arguments from the court filing the defendants submitted on Tuesday. Stateline reporter Anna Claire Vollers can be reached at avollers@stateline.org.

Source: Washington State Standard

This article was originally published by Washington State Standard.