Did a Private Equity Fire Truck Roll-Up Worsen the L.A. Fires?
During the LA fires, dozens of fire trucks sat in the boneyard, waiting for repairs the city couldn't afford. Why? A private equity roll-up made replacing and repairing those trucks much pricier.
Hasnain says:
TIL over half of LA’s fire trucks were out of commission during the recent fires and a nontrivial amount of the blame here goes to… private equity
“While AIP’s consolidation of economic power over fire truck manufacturing is appalling, it is not some unsolvable, intractable problem we just have to live with. State and federal antitrust laws already prohibit the kind of monopolistic roll-up that AIP perpetrated — they just need to be enforced. State AGs can bring lawsuits to force REV Group to divest the manufacturers it illegally acquired and to pay damages to fire departments for the harm that its (attempted) monopolization of the fire-truck industry has caused. Fire departments and other fire-apparatus purchasers can bring their own lawsuits to do the same. So can the FTC and the DOJ’s Antitrust Division. If state legislators or members of Congress want to pave the way for such lawsuits, they can launch their own investigations into the fire apparatus industry. And if anyone wants guidance on what a lawsuit against AIP could look like, Lina Khan left us a roadmap just before she stepped down from the FTC last week — when she sued private-equity giant Welsh Carson for rolling up Texas anesthesiology practices to drive up the price of anesthesia services to Texas patients.
We have all the tools we need to check AIP’s greed and abuse and restructure the fire-truck industry so it serves the public interest. The only question is whether our political leaders have the will.”
Posted on 2025-01-25T20:08:09+0000