State officials say a major school bus operator got caught playing favorites instead of playing fair, and now it is paying up. Beacon Mobility Corporation, an Ohio-based student transportation company, has agreed to a $2.4 million settlement after Massachusetts investigators alleged it quietly carved up special-education bus routes in Lynn, Dedham and Saugus with a rival contractor between 2022 and 2025. According to the attorney general, that backroom arrangement meant less competition and higher prices for districts that already struggle to fund specialized transportation.
In an agreement detailed by the Massachusetts Attorney General’s Office, Beacon and its Massachusetts subsidiaries, Van Pool Transportation LLC and NRT Bus, Inc., entered into an assurance of discontinuance that locks in the $2.4 million payment along with a slate of oversight requirements. Most of the money will be returned to the three affected municipalities. The company must also keep an internal antitrust compliance program in place for at least five years, notify the AG’s office of any transportation-company acquisitions for ten years, and cooperate with any future investigations.
“When companies engage in unlawful collusion that increase costs for municipalities, it reduces their ability to fund other critical programs,” Attorney General Andrea Campbell said in announcing the deal.
How the AG Says the Scheme Worked
The AG’s office alleges that in 2022, Beacon coordinated with an unnamed competitor by agreeing not to bid on each other’s contracts, effectively granting each company a local monopoly in certain towns. As reported by The Boston Globe, the settlement references internal emails in which a Beacon employee wrote, “I know [they] won’t come to Lynn next year,” and cautioned colleagues that they would not want to “take … work” from the rival. Investigators say those messages support the claim that the companies were divvying up markets instead of competing on price…