Orange Beach could become the latest city to sue the nation’s fire engine manufacturers, accusing them of colluding to overprice the vehicles that fire departments across the country buy — including, potentially, the two engines the city has already approved for purchase at a cost of more than $1.2 million.
The Orange Beach City Council will take up the question at its July 7 Committee of the Whole meeting, after a work session in which Birmingham attorney Keith Jackson, of the firm Riley and Jackson, walked council members through the allegations.
In various instances, Jackson told the council, fire engine manufacturers have conspired to sell overpriced vehicles. Lawsuits filed by cities and fire departments across the nation have been combined into a multi-district litigation — a federal procedure that consolidates similar cases so they can be litigated together rather than separately.
What the city has bought
The stakes for Orange Beach are concrete. Fire Chief Jeff Smith told council members that two fire engines have been approved for purchase within the next three years at a combined cost of more than $1.2 million. The manufacturer, Pierce Custom Pumpers, has been named in the lawsuits Jackson referenced, City Administrator Ford Handley said.
Since 2016, the city has purchased five fire engines. Jackson said three of those past purchases were flagged by him as overpriced. Smith noted that the price of fire engines has risen significantly over that period — a trend departments across the country have blamed on everything from chassis shortages to, in the litigation, alleged coordination among the few companies that dominate the market.
“If these allegations are correct, and they were making us informed so that we would know what the story is, and if the city of Orange Beach decided that we’ve been paying too much and we were taken to the cleaners and ripped off, so to speak, we may deserve to try to get some of that money back,” said Councilman Pat Simpson, who joined the council in early June.
How the litigation works
Multi-district litigation consolidates pretrial proceedings in a single federal court while preserving each city’s individual claims. For a city the size of Orange Beach, joining an existing MDL lowers the cost of pursuing damages — the heavy lifting of discovery against the manufacturers is shared — while still allowing the city to recover its own overpayments if the allegations hold up.
Councilmen Jeff Silvers and Jack Robertson asked that the item be placed on the agenda for the July 7 Committee of the Whole, one of the council’s two standing session formats, held immediately after regular council meetings at City Hall.
Mayor Tony Kennon declined to comment on the potential lawsuit, deferring questions to city staff and making no statements about the idea after the discussion with Jackson.
A decision with a deadline
Joining the litigation is not automatic. Contingency-fee arrangements of the kind typically offered in these cases mean the city would pay nothing up front, with the firm recovering a percentage of any settlement or verdict. But councils must weigh the strength of their own purchase records, the years those purchases span, and the possibility that the litigation — like most — ends in a modest global settlement spread across many claimants.
The council is expected to hear more detail on July 7 before deciding whether to sign on. Whatever it decides, the review already has officials looking closely at what the city has paid for red trucks — and whether the price was ever really set by the market.