Johnston and Grimes join dozens of cities suing fire truck manufacturers

The cities of Johnston and Grimes are joining Des Moines and dozens of other municipalities in suing the some of the nation’s biggest providers of fire trucks over alleged parasitic pricing.

Johnston and Grimes, as members of the Johnston-Grimes Metropolitan Fire District, are suing REV Group and more than a dozen of its affiliates in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Iowa. Other defendants include American Industrial Partners and its affiliates, Oshkosh Corporation, Pierce Manufacturing and Boise Mobile Equipment.

The lawsuit challenges what it calls “the defendants’ multi-year, anticompetitive schemes to consolidate and ‘roll up’ markets for critical lifesaving apparatuses — fire trucks and the chassis on which they are built — and exclusionary restraints in the markets for replacement parts for their apparatuses.”

The lawsuit claims the defendants have methodically acquired industry competitors, as well as key companies in the apparatus supply chain, and that Oshkosh and Pierce have restricted fire departments’ ability to replace parts — all with the intent of lessening competition.

Through these “illegal schemes,” the lawsuit alleges, the defendants have “reaped extraordinary profits on the backs of fire departments, taxpayers, cities, and counties.” This has resulted in Johnston and Grimes paying “substantial overcharges” and reduced  equipment value, the lawsuit claims.

Specifically, that lawsuit claims that in November 2024, the Johnston-Grimes Metropolitan Fire District purchased a Pierce firefighting truck for $1.7 million. In October 2025, the district purchased a Pierce pumper truck for roughly $1 million. Those prices, the lawsuit alleges, include “hundreds of thousands of dollars in anticompetitive overcharges.”

In addition, the lawsuit claims, the defendants have drastically extended the delivery dates for purchased equipment, with Johnston-Grimes’ wait time to receive the pumper purchased in October 2025 now estimated to be more than three years.

The lawsuit claims that beginning in 2008, AIP embarked on a decade-long strategy to consolidate the markets for fire apparatus and chassis manufacturing with its acquisition of E ONE, then one of the largest fire apparatus manufacturers in the United States.

In 2015, AIP allegedly accelerated its consolidation strategy under the REV Group of companies, and acquired Kovatch Mobile Equipment Corp. In 2017, AIP and REV Group acquired Ferrara Fire Apparatus and three years later acquired Spartan Emergency Response.

Eventually, the lawsuit asserts, nearly a dozen once-independent companies were rolled into a single corporation, and the REV Group began shutting down manufacturing plants, causing significant price increases as well as product-order backlogs estimated at $4.2 billion in value.

“The markets for fire apparatuses, chassis, and Pierce replacement parts are no longer competitive,” the lawsuit claims. “They are markets dominated by powerful behemoths. These manufacturers bought their way to dominance, and they are now in full extraction mode, deliberately suppressing output, withholding supply, delaying deliveries, restricting competitive options, and charging supra-competitive prices without consequence … Our fire departments do not deserve this. Our firefighters do not deserve this. The taxpayers those firefighters swear an oath to protect do not deserve this. The extraction of excessive private rents from the public must stop, and it must stop now.”

In April, a federal court consolidated the claims of more than 60 cities into a trio of antitrust class action lawsuits to be tried in a Wisconsin court.

In June, the City of Des Moines sued the REV Group, 14 of its affiliates and 11 other companies that produce firefighting trucks, parts and equipment. The claims in that lawsuit are virtually identical to those in the newly filed Johnston-Grimes case.

As part of its lawsuit, Des Moines claims it has ordered firefighting apparatus with a delivery date 42 to 45 months away — although the equipment’s useful life is no more than 10 to 20 years.

The lawsuits filed in Iowa and elsewhere allege private equity has played a pivotal role in the alleged reduction of competition. In 2018, the lawsuits claim, REV Group’s then-CEO Tim Sullivan told investors, “We like backlog, we love backlog.”

The lawsuits seek not only unspecified financial damages to recover money lost to the allegedly illegal anticompetitive actions of the defendants, but also an injunction that would prohibit any such conduct in the future.

In various court filings, the REV Group and other defendants have denied any wrongdoing and asserted the COVID-19 pandemic “prompted skyrocketing demand and disrupted supply chains, causing price increases and longer wait times.”

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

Last fall, at a U.S. Senate hearing on the consolidation of fire equipment providers, Dennis Rubin, the fire chief in Kansas City, Kansas, told federal lawmakers, “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.”

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.