“Nesquehoning and KME were kind of like one and one with each other,” said Trey Koerbler, 37, who lived a few blocks from the factory, rode on the KME trucks as a volunteer firefighter and used to work at the plant, just as his uncle and grandfather once did.
“It’s a pride thing,” he said.
Now, that was about to disappear, too.
In many ways, KME was closing at the best possible time for its workers.
The labor market was hot. Companies were desperate to hire. The roads outside the KME factory here in the foothills of the Pocono mountains were dotted with “Help wanted” signs.
“Every one of them could find a new job tomorrow if they wanted,” said Sam Hellen, until recently the administrator at a state workforce development office in town.
But something harder to measure was being lost.
A booming economy two years into a pandemic has generated incredible growth and better pay for many workers, but also growing doubts about the work left to be done — a contrast that helps explain why the country’s record-setting growth has felt so odd for so many.
Workers across the country have been quitting their jobs at historic rates during the pandemic — with manufacturing workers leaving at the highest clip, according to federal data. Many factory jobs, after years of sluggish wage growth, now offer pay on par with the service sector. And companies still wield enormous power over workers.
At KME, the allure of working for the hometown company had been fading for several years, ever since a private equity firm bought the company from a local family. And it became clear to many that the kind of blue-collar jobs that sustained places like Nesquehoning were being streamlined out of existence.
The pandemic didn’t change that.
It just softened the blow.
“People here want to be known for something,” said Jesse Walck, business manager for the local school district. “And now what will that be? Nothing.”
The fate of KME was no longer in local hands after it was sold in 2016. The new owners went public a few months later. Today, KME is just one of six firetruck brands owned by a single company called REV Group. In the fall, its executives announced that the Nesquehoning plant would close and production would shift to other states.
“This is not a decision taken lightly,” an executive who had flown in from Orlando to deliver the news told KME workers in September.
KME — also known as Kovatch Mobile Equipment — got its start when Sonny Kovatch returned from the Army and opened a small garage in his hometown in 1946. He added a dealership. He started making trucks. He kept growing, adding in oil refueling trucks and fire engines.
“Everyone was so elated as he added building after building over the years,” recalled Frank Jacobs, 88, a town councilman and retired truck driver.
Kovatch grew KME into the country’s largest private manufacturer of fire apparatus. The company sold every type of pumper, engine and ladder truck. It sold to small volunteer agencies and major departments in cities such as Atlanta, Boston and Philadelphia. Los Angeles County bought 250 firetrucks. New York City bought nearly 100. A couple of years ago, KME delivered two new trucks to the D.C. fire department.
The small fire departments in rural Pennsylvania were especially loyal.
“When we had local people working on the apparatus, we knew they took extra special care,” said Wayne Nothstein, county commission chairman and a volunteer firefighter in nearby Lehighton.
In 2020, Lehighton voted to buy a $1.1 million KME firetruck with a 109-foot ladder. That truck is scheduled to be finished in two months. It will be among the last made locally.
Fire agencies are particular about their trucks — which can cost $250,000 to more than $1 million each. Some swear by stainless steel. Others want aluminum. They have strong opinions about the seats and the lights. Some departments stage a ceremony with firefighters pushing a new truck into the station for the first time.
Firetrucks also inspire awe. People post video clips of the vehicles running down streets — like train-spotters along railroad tracks. You can buy tiny replicas of different models, too.
At one point, the world headquarters of KME in Nesquehoning employed more than 700 people in a town of 3,300. When times were good, everyone knew to stay off the roads about 3:30 p.m. on weekdays, when the day shift let out. The surge in traffic fed the town’s three gas stations and a small grocery store, amenities that residents said they probably wouldn’t have without KME.
The town still had problems. Poverty was persistent. Some of the houses sitting tight by the road in the heart of town looked tired, their front porches worn and the siding faded. A town that was home to six or seven churches when Koerbler was a child now had two or three. There were fewer neighborhood bars, too.
“That is the world that is today,” Koerbler said without sentimentality.
KME sustained the town in other ways. It helped sponsor the local Anthracite Little League — the company name splashed across jerseys and posted on an outfield banner at the town’s baseball diamond. There was a scholarship fund named after Sonny Kovatch. The family also donated money for new baseball bats and football helmets. They chipped in to refurbish the high school’s weight room.
“The family donated to everything,” Walck said.
The company’s success always felt like a hedge against the decline of the coal industry and the town’s remote location well off the turnpike. Local leaders had tried different initiatives to attract new industries to town, Jacobs said. But none of the efforts worked like making firetrucks.
Employees tended to stay at KME. Craftsmen refined their skills. Painters made sure the trucks gleamed — often in fire-engine red, but also in yellow, orange, pink and black.
The work stayed interesting because the factory was not run like a typical assembly line, said Garry Wentz, who for years ran the Pocono Counties Workforce Development Area. The bends in the water pipes were done by hand, not with a robot. Employees learned new skills rather than doing small, repetitive tasks. When KME was family-owned, a job at the factory was something to hold on to, according to Wentz.
“You’d sell your right arm to get in there,” Wentz said.
The pride in having a job at the firetruck factory trickled down to the workers’ children, too. Teachers could see it.
“If you have a parent who worked at Kovatch, you had a work ethic,” Walck said.
The jobs provided stability, said David McAndrew, schools superintendent.
“The children of KME workers knew their parents were hard-working, and they prided themselves on that,” he said.
The school district also depended on KME for its tax base.
The impact of the factory’s closing was still being worked out. But the Panther Valley School District was already in trouble. Its six-year college graduation rate was under 12 percent. The district was severely underfunded, despite having the state’s 10th-highest property tax rate, officials said. Now, it was one of several districts suing the state over education funding.
Even as Panther Valley saw property assessments increase in 2020, Walck said, the amount of property tax revenue going to the schools declined because so many other properties fell into blight.
“It’s not a good situation,” Walck said.
Koerbler started at KME in 2011. It was just a couple of years after the meltdown of the financial system. No one was thinking about buying firetrucks.
“There were no firetrucks in the plant,” he said.
But no one was laid off.
And the next few years were good for Koerbler and KME.
Orders picked up. Then, in 2015, KME worked on a coveted contract to supply and service more than 90 pumpers to the Fire Department of New York — the nation’s largest. Getting its business was a big deal — a seal of approval for the company and a shot in the arm for the town.
Five days a week, Koerbler left town in the early morning and drove 125 miles to New York City to service the trucks.
It was one year into that New York City contract that the Kovatch family announced they were selling.
The price was never revealed. The family declined to comment for this article. But by the time of the sale, Sonny Kovatch had been dead four years, and his son, John Kovatch III, was running the operations.
The new owner was REV Group, which was itself a new company, created by the private-equity firm American Industrial Partners to run the specialty-vehicle makers it had snapped up.
A few months later, REV Group went public in a $275 million IPO.
REV Group’s track record could be summed up by a graphic in its 2021 annual report, titled “A history of consolidation.” The Brookfield, Wis.-headquartered company today owns 17 firms — including six makers of firetrucks.
In recent years, the company struggled to make money with KME. It lost $1 million a month in the past two years trying to turn it around, Mark Skonieczny, chief financial officer at REV, said during an earnings call in December.
It was a culture clash, according to workers and officials in Nesquehoning.
REV tried to implement a traditional production line with increased automation. It made business sense. REV could slash costs if it simplified tasks. But the business tactics collided with what made KME stand out.
“They were changing the things that made the job appealing to workers,” Wentz said.
Koerbler stopped going to New York when the pandemic started. The company started outsourcing some of its service work. And the new KME wasn’t afraid to fire people. In 2019, it laid off 15 percent of its workforce.
Koerbler had once imagined staying at KME forever. But now, worried about his own job, he felt newly open to offers.
“I had an opportunity, and I took it,” he said.
Last summer, he went to work for a family-owned company that services firetrucks.
A few weeks later, REV said it planned to close the Nesquehoning plant by April. The six-month warning was unusual. The company dangled $5,000 bonuses if workers stayed on.
Kathy Henderson, economic development director for the local Chamber of Commerce, learned the end was coming from a phone call with Nothstein, the commission chairman, who’d gotten a text from someone on the workforce investment board.
“OK, well, that’s not very good,” Henderson recalled responding. “But maybe we’ll wait and see.”
But local officials didn’t even know whom to contact at KME. There seemed to be a new plant manager every year since the family sold.
“Over the last five years, they grew less communicative, and we grew more alarmed,” Henderson said.
“We’d never seen it coming,” Nothstein said.
A few weeks later, local leaders finally got a meeting with the KME plant manager. They crowded into a conference room at the Chamber — state and local officials, plus a representative from the area’s U.S. congressman.
A local politician asked what everyone was wondering: “Are you really sure you’re leaving? Is there anything we can do to keep you here?”
The plant manager said it wasn’t up to him, according to several people in the room.
“In the corporate world, it’s all numbers. If something isn’t working quite right, they cut and run,” said state Rep. Doyle Heffley, a Republican, who attended the meeting.
“I don’t think there’s any controlling it,” Nothstein said. “That’s what happens.”
A few months into his new job, Koerbler dropped by Nesquehoning Hose Company No. 1.
It was the weekly drill night at the volunteer fire station.
Koerbler was assistant chief of a department with 16 regular firefighters. On this night, that number was whittled down to six. It was opening day for turkey hunting season. No drills tonight.
Volunteer fire departments in towns like Nesquehoning are part first-responder units and part social clubs. The loss of KME probably would mean fewer men and women in town during the workday to answer to emergencies. But it went further than that.
“A lot of people’s livelihoods have been upended,” Fire Chief John McArdle said.
McArdle figured he’d be OK. He was 61. Retirement was on the horizon. His children were grown. One of his sons had worked as an engineer at KME until shortly before the closure was announced. He now worked as a professional firefighter about 25 miles away.
But McArdle wasn’t sure about the town.
“There was lots of pride in that industry,” he said.
The chief stood in the firehouse bay with Koerbler, where the department’s three green-and-white firetrucks sat lined up.
Koerbler rattled off from memory when each truck had rolled off the KME production line.
The big pumper truck was No. 5,000 — the 5,000th firetruck ever made at the Nesquehoning plant. That was in 2002.
The ladder truck: No. 8,588.
The small pumper truck: No. 9,849 in 2015.
Those numbers were about to come to an end.
But they were numbers Koerbler knew by heart.
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A hot labor market softens the blow of the KME fire truck factory's closure in Pennsylvania. But residents worry about the kind of work that remains. - The Washington Post
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