Sudden closing of Falcon contrasts sharply with past

In August 2007, The Vindicator published an in-depth story about family-owned Falcon Transport with the headline, “Valley trucking company rides fast track to growth.”

Today, in the wake of the surprise announcement that private equity firm-owned Falcon has abruptly closed its doors, the headline would read “Valley trucking company rides into the darkness”.

The contrast between The Vindicator’s report 12 years ago and this week’s death knell is palpable.

In 2007, Don Constantini, then chairman and chief executive of Falcon and its sister company, Comprehensive Logistics, announced that coinciding with the company’s 25th anniversary, a new headquarters was being established in Liberty Township. Falcon had been operating out of leased office space on Meridian Road in Austintown.

The new digs were the former headquarters of Delphi Packard Electric on Belmont Avenue.

But that information wasn’t the wow factor in the story. This was: Falcon Transport had grown so fast that a trade publication ranked it the 97th largest trucking company in the nation.

Falcon and Comprehensive posted revenues of $205.5 million in 2006, a 15 percent increase over the year before.

The well-known Valley company added 40 office workers in two years, creating the need for expanded office space.

Falcon had three divisions: Automotive, where parts were brought into assembly plants; flatbeds, which hauled steel, aluminum and construction materials; and general commodities, which transported consumer goods.

Comprehensive Logistics, which is still owned by the Constantini family, manages domestic transportation needs for its customers, including shipments by truck, rail and barge.

Its Austintown warehouse served the General Motors’ Lordstown complex, where it handled 85 percent of parts shipped to the plant.

In 2007, Comprehensive sent 480 truckloads of parts to the Lordstown plant each 16-hour workday.

The closing of Falcon has not affected Comprehensive’s distribution network. Indeed, over the weekend, the company was able to retain many of Falcon’s former drivers.

Pessimism

But the optimism reflected in the story in 2007 on the 25th anniversary of Falcon has been replaced by the pessimism now sweeping the Mahoning Valley.

On Saturday night, with no advance notice, 577 Falcon employees – 89 office workers, 81 owner-operators and 407 regular drivers – received a message from the company that it had ceased operations in the Valley.

The company is owned by Los Angeles-based CounterPoint Capital Partners, LLC, which bought it from the Constantini family in 2017. There were 800 employees at the time.

There has been no official word from Falcon regarding its decision to pull up stakes from the Valley without any warning. However, it’s not a stretch to conclude that the idling of the GM Lordstown plant has impacted Falcon’s financial viability.

When three shifts were in high gear, there were 4,500 employees at the plant producing the top-selling Chevrolet Cruze compact car. GM blamed changing consumer tastes – trucks, SUVs and crossovers are the rage – for its decision to end production of the Cruze.

In addition to the loss of the Lords-town jobs, another 2,000 or so related jobs have been eliminated in the Valley.

Now, the region has to deal with some more bad news.

But unlike the closing of GM Lords-town and company CEO Mary Barra’s refusal to make a commitment to assign another product to the Valley, trucking companies in this region and around the country are desperate for qualified, experienced drivers.

WARN notice

As of Wednesday, Falcon Trucking had not filed a notice of mass layoffs with the Ohio Department of Job and Family Services, as required by the federal Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act of 1988.

A company with at least 100 full-time employees must file the WARN notice 60 days before the mass layoff.

A class-action lawsuit is being contemplated against the company for not issuing the WARN notice, and Valley Congressman Tim Ryan, a candidate for the Democratic nomination for president, has written to the U.S. secretary of labor, Alexander Acosta, urging him to help the laid off Falcon workers.

When GM announced it was idling the Lordstown plant, we urged the administration of President Donald Trump to persuade the giant automaker to find another product for the 53-year-complex or to bring in another major manufacturer.

Neither has occurred.