Your Town's Next Fire Truck Costs $1 Million

Introduction

American Industrial Partners took $127.6 million out of REV Group in March 2024, in a filing flagged as an exit. Seventeen months later, cities started suing the company it built. AIP bought its first fire truck company, E-ONE, in 2008, and spent the next twelve years buying more, folding the purchases into REV Group. REV Group's then-CEO, Timothy Sullivan, told shareholders after the 2017 IPO that the plan was to take the acquired companies from margins of "4 to 5 percent to above 10 percent." How he described the method, quoted in Senate testimony last September: "You bring them into the fold... you got to give them the religion, and they've got it now." On March 15, 2024, AIP sold 7,395,191 REV Group shares at $17.25 apiece, with about 3% of the company left over.

Watertown, New York ordered a KME aerial ladder truck at the start of 2021. Fire Chief Matthew R. Timerman took delivery five years and three months later, at $1.4 million, after REV closed the Pennsylvania plant that was supposed to build it, the Watertown Daily Times reported. Your town buys engines off the same short list, REV Group, Oshkosh's Pierce Manufacturing and Rosenbauer America, which hold roughly two-thirds to 80% of the U.S. market depending on the source. All three are defendants in a federal antitrust case alleging they held supply down to push prices up.

How the Fire Truck Market Got Down to Three

Prices doubled inside a decade and waits stretched past four years, and the clearest thing that changed is who owns the factories. A private equity firm spent twelve years, 2008 to 2020, buying fire truck makers and folding them into one of the three companies now accused of keeping supply tight while prices climbed. The firm cashed out in 2024, and the company it assembled stopped existing as an independent business in February 2026.

The New York Times, which reconstructed the roll-up in February 2025, dates the start to 2006, when American Industrial Partners "decided to create one large company out of a collection of small specialty vehicle businesses." E-ONE came in 2008, REV Group was assembled in 2015, KME followed in 2016 and Ferrara in 2017, then Spartan, Smeal and Ladder Tower in 2020. Oshkosh took the same route earlier, buying Pierce in 1996.

The delivery dates are where the closures show up. In September 2021, during a demand surge, REV announced it was shutting two custom fire truck plants; the KME plant in Pennsylvania closed in April 2022, cutting roughly a third of its fire truck manufacturing footprint by the count of antitrust attorney Basel Musharbash.

What Only FAMA's Members Get to See

The 66-page founding complaint, filed by the City of La Crosse, Wisconsin on August 20, 2025, names the alleged mechanism: the Fire Apparatus Manufacturers' Association. La Crosse alleges FAMA collects "sensitive, non-public economic data" from the manufacturers, has an outside consultant compile it, and hands the result back only to dues-paying members. The three companies, it says, "unlawfully conspired to use their collective market power to suppress the fire truck supply and raise prices." An engine that cost $500,000 in the mid-2010s now runs $1 million, and waits went from 18 months to more than four years.

None of that has been proven. The Judicial Panel on Multidistrict Litigation centralized twelve suits on April 3, 2026 in the Eastern District of Wisconsin, listing among the common questions "the role of private equity firm American Industrial Partners and its affiliates in the alleged price increases." The defendants asked for that consolidation; plaintiffs in six of the underlying cases opposed it. No court has found anyone liable.

LA County Counsel Dawyn R. Harrison sued in February 2026, naming AIP, REV Group and Oshkosh, and asked for civil penalties plus an injunction "requiring unwinding of the anticompetitive mergers and acquisitions." Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton issued civil investigative demands the next day. On July 21, 2026, Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Jim Banks, with Reps. Becca Balint and Ben Cline, introduced a joint resolution that would direct the FTC to investigate and report back within a year.

REV Group Put Its Margins in a Filing

Sullivan said "above 10 percent" in 2017. REV Group's FY2025 Form 10-K reports the Specialty Vehicles segment, which includes fire apparatus and ambulances, at a 12.5% adjusted EBITDA margin, up from 8.9% in FY2024 and 5.5% in FY2023. That's the part I keep coming back to: the target wasn't buried in a deposition, it was said out loud to investors, and the filed numbers show it landing.

Backlog gets the same treatment. REV describes it in filings as giving "strong visibility into future net sales," and on the June 5, 2024 earnings call CEO Mark Skonieczny told analysts, "With strong backlogs that extend up to two and a half years, these businesses have the visibility and opportunity to drive significant shareholder value." The backlog Skonieczny is describing is the same queue a fire department sits in, counted from the other end.

In FY2024, REV spent $126.1 million on buybacks against $27.6 million of capital expenditure; in FY2025, $107.6 million against $51.1 million. Musharbash tracks REV's market capitalization from about $500 million in October 2020 to about $1.5 billion in December 2024.

The Morning of the Palisades Fire

January 7, 2025 is what made this national. Former LAFD Chief Kristin Crowley later told the Los Angeles City Council that "over 100 of our fire engines, firetrucks and ambulances sat broken down in our maintenance yards." The Los Angeles Times, working from LAFD maintenance records it obtained, reported in March 2025 that 40 regular engines were out of service the day the fire started, one in five of the department's fleet.

The version that traveled furthest was neither of those. "More than half of LA's 183 fire trucks" traces to a Daily Mail write-up rather than any LAFD or city record, and it still ended up in a union letter and a court filing. Crowley's own count came without a denominator, and she had a reason to lean high: Mayor Karen Bass removed her as chief on February 21, 2025, weeks before that Council appearance.

LA's fleet problem isn't purely a manufacturer problem either. The city cut a reported $17 million from the fire department, and the Fire Commission's president said there weren't enough mechanics. Nobody at REV or Oshkosh caused that shortage; they're alleged to have driven the prices squeezing the same budget.

Who Benefits

American Industrial Partners and its limited partners, in cash. The playbook isn't exotic: buy fragmented manufacturers with single-digit margins, consolidate them, close the redundant plants, push margins into double digits, take the whole thing public, then sell down. The March 2024 sale dropped AIP below the 10% ownership threshold that requires continued reporting, and it kept about 3% with no obligation to say what it did next.

REV Group's shareholders took the second cut, through those buybacks and that tripled valuation. The company's framing of backlog as investor "visibility" is the cleanest statement of the incentive anywhere: the wait a fire chief lives as a crisis is the same fact sold upward as a feature.

FAMA, if the allegations hold up, supplied what three competitors would otherwise have to build themselves: a way to see each other's production and pricing data without writing anything down. Members pay dues and get the compiled numbers; the cities buying trucks get a quote. FAMA did not immediately respond to Reuters' request for comment in November 2025.

The payer, every time, is a municipal budget funded by local taxes.

The Defense: Bespoke Trucks and Real Demand

Mike Virnig, who runs REV Group's fire truck division, told the New York Times in February 2025 that fire apparatus has "little room for automation," and that "fire departments buy trucks every 10 to 15 years on average and have incredibly specific requests, so most trucks are bespoke vehicles."

REV's Specialty Vehicles backlog grew 2.5% in FY2024 and 5.3% in FY2025, a plateau rather than a runaway curve, and capital spending nearly doubled as a share of sales in FY2025, to 2.07% from 1.16%. Both figures postdate the Senate testimony and the House letter.

Oshkosh spokesperson Tim Gilman called the allegations "without merit" in early September 2025 and said the company "remains committed to delivering safe, high-quality fire trucks." Rosenbauer America's counsel Ali Rader told WPR days earlier, "We strongly disagree with the claims made in this lawsuit, and Rosenbauer America will assertively defend itself in court." The chassis and chip shortages of 2020 through 2022 were real, and so was the federal money that had cities ordering apparatus at once.

Chasing a Company That No Longer Exists

AIP is a defendant in every action inside MDL 3179 for conduct that ran from 2008 to about 2020. REV Group was delisted when a Terex merger valued near $9 billion closed in February 2026. The MDL, the county suits, the Texas demands and the joint resolution all point at an arrangement already taken apart, at a profit, by the people who assembled it.

The timing follows the shape of the strategy: a roll-up's returns arrive when margin expansion shows up in the multiple, which for AIP happened between the 2017 IPO and the 2024 exit, while antitrust arrives after enough buyers compare notes and get past a motion to dismiss. LA County wants those mergers unwound, and they now sit inside Terex.

Closed plants don't reopen on a litigation schedule either. The Pennsylvania plant that was supposed to build Watertown's ladder truck shut in April 2022, and Chief Timerman's truck got built somewhere else, years late.

The Bottom Line

The most useful documents here are REV Group's own filings: a margin target announced to shareholders in 2017 and a 12.5% segment margin in the FY2025 10-K, with a backlog sold as investor visibility while a Watertown chief lives it as five years and three months. Proving a conspiracy on top of that is a separate job, and the plaintiffs still have to do it.

What's unresolved is what any remedy reaches. No public FTC enforcement action or 6(b) study has surfaced in the fourteen months since the firefighters' union asked for one, and S.J.Res. 201 would give the agency a year to report back, assuming it passes. Damages, if plaintiffs win them, land in city budgets years from now. So the question I'd want answered before liability: what gets delivery times back to eighteen months, and is there anyone in this case with both the power and the incentive to do it?