On Friday, Richmond Fire Department held a “push-in” ceremony for the newest truck at Church Hill’s historic Fire Station 1. The tradition “symboliz[es] its official start of service in the community,” the city announced in a press release. It also symbolizes an enormous windfall for the private-equity industry, at Richmond taxpayers’ expense.

Since the pandemic, the country has been gripped by what firefighting unions and municipal leaders refer to as a “fire truck crisis.” The upshot: the pricetags on the engines, ladder trucks, and other specialty vehicles that departments across the country depend on to fight fires have skyrocketed in half a decade. The eye-popping hikes have been driven by increased input costs due to strains on the global supply chain and unique manufacturing requirements that undercut the economies of scale automobile companies rely on to break even. But they’ve also been driven by an astonishing spate of industry consolidation.

“[M]anufacturers now use their market power to artificially inflate prices and extend delivery timelines of critical fire apparatus,” Edward Kelly, the general president of the International Association of Fire Fighters testified before the United States Senate last year. Independent analyses and reporting suggest that just three firms control more than two-thirds of the market for fire vehicles in the United States, with that share even more concentrated in some regions. (Most economists consider a market to be an oligopoly when five or fewer firms control more than 60% of the share.) The result, Kelly told lawmakers, is that “[t]he cost of fire trucks has doubled over the past decade, with pumper trucks now costing around $1 million and ladder trucks exceeding $2 million in some areas.”

The triumvirate of truck manufacturers driving these increases—REV Group, Oshkosh Corporation, and Rosenbauer—have come to their dominant positions atop the market not through organic growth but a series of acquisitions. REV Group and Rosenbauer are so-called private-equity “roll-ups”: companies cobbled together from one-time competitors by fund managers aiming to use scale to extract profits from cost cuts, layoffs, and more complex forms of balance-sheet chicanery found in the industry’s tried-and-true financial-engineering playbook. Oshkosh, a publicly traded conglomerate that answers to Wall Street investors, is itself composed of multiple previously independent industrial brands, including Jerr-Dann, JLG, and Pierce.

Seagrave Fire Apparatus, the firm from which Richmond purchased Fire Station 1’s new 100-foot tractor-drawn aerial (TDA) truck, was acquired by a private-equity firm called ELB Capital Management in 2003. It’s just one of several purchases that critics have argued have “severed the close ties” between family-owned manufacturers and fire departments and “made profit a larger component in the business relationship,” as Pennsylvania’s deputy fire commissioner put it in testimony before the state’s legislature earlier this year.

The effects of all this high fuh-nānce and market capture on Richmond’s Fire Department budget have been dramatic, as The Richmonder’s Sarah Vogelsong recently reported (emphasis added):

Doing nothing isn’t the solution it may seem. Keeping old trucks on the road past their useful life comes with heightened maintenance costs and downtimes due to part-sourcing struggles, Vogelsong added, citing recent City Council proceedings on the situation.

A lawsuit brought by more than 60 public authorities across the country over the top firetruck firms’ allegedly anticompetitive practices is ongoing in the Eastern District of Wisconsin. A city spokesperson told Vogelsong that Richmond isn’t a part of it, and has no plans to join.

So the next time you see Fire Station 1’s shiny new Seagrave rolling by on its way to a blaze, take it as a welcome reminder that the Richmond is investing in crucial public goods—and an unwelcome reminder that Richmonders are getting rolled by private investors in the process.

Possum Poetry is original verse written exclusively for The Lookout by Penelope Poubelle, the Lookout’s litter critter-at-large. If you spot roadside trash you’d like her to immortalize in doggerel, email a photo to [email protected]. All submissions anonymous!

Happy Richmond Arbor Day! What’s that? Why does the city have its own Arbor Day that’s completely unrelated to the national holiday by the same name? I’m sure there’s a completely normal reason that wouldn’t give you an aneurysm if you tried to grasp it.

Anyway, on Halloween, as neighborhood volunteers were setting up for the first-ever BooFest on Broad, other neighborhood volunteers were hard at work planting some two dozen new saplings in Chimborazo Playground. A schematic circulated earlier this year by the Church Hill Association, the Friends of Chimborazo Playground, and the Chesapeake Bay Foundation called for 28 new trees total across 16 different cultivars.

In other tree-related news in Church Hill, as I type this, even more volunteers are putting some 50 new trees in the ground at Libby Hill Park under the guidance of the Chesapeake Bay Foundation and Richmond’s Department of Parks, Recreation, and Community Facilities. Trees!

Courtesy of Lookout reader Isabelle White, the latest edition of East End Animal Friend is live now, and cute as hell:

As a reminder, East End Animal Friends is a recurring feature spotlighting the many creature companions of Church Hill and its surrounds. Fill out this form to introduce your beloved animal(s) to the neighborhood in a future edition of The Lookout!

Happenings on The Hill is a digital bulletin board for events, causes, and other items of interest to East Enders that don’t necessarily merit full editorial treatment. Got something for a future edition? Email the relevant details, links, etc. to [email protected] for consideration!

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