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.”…