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Notes -
Sometimes it is parasitising, though. Last month, the Massachusetts AG settled with Beacon Mobility, a private equity school bus roll-up, for $2.4M over colluding with a competitor to carve up special ed busing contracts in three towns. Beacon then bid as the sole bidder and signed a certificate of non-collusion anyway. After the rival floated a big rate hike, a Beacon employee wrote "Like us, they need to get their rates up as well and now all the business managers are freaking out." The PE owner (Audax, 1,500+ add-on acquisitions firm-wide) bought dozens of local bus companies and kept the old names on the buses, so districts soliciting bids often don't notice "competitors" share an owner. The state inspector general found 67% of districts got one or zero bids last cycle, and renewals came in 35-51% higher, way past cost inflation.
It's not only Massachusetts, Beacon now own many as 30 transport companies across 25 states.
Do colluding transportation companies or PE working to extract tax-dollars from schools count as a cabal or is this an emergent phenomena?
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