Tri County Transportation sold to Beacon Mobility

PUNXSUTAWNEY — The company that holds the contract for transportation in the Punxsutawney Area School District has been sold.

That news was delivered by Bob Koban, Tri County Transportation, and Joe Scott, Beacon Mobility, who presented the details of the sale to the school board at Tuesday’s meeting.

“We’re here tonight to share some good news with you. We talked with Dr. (Thomas) Lesniewski (superintendent) back in November regarding the sale of Tri-County Transportation by the owner, Jerry Tibbott,” Koban said. “We wanted to bring Joe Scott, CEO of a sister company to TCT and the senior vice president of the new ownership, to the school board meeting to introduce to everyone.”

Scott said that it’s just a sale of stock. Tri County Transportation still exists its under new ownership.

Koban said the name will stay the same, and all of the staff are being retained.

“We’ve only been in this a little over a month, and truly it was better than we ever expected,” Koban said.

He said that Tibbott had invited some of the upper management to the process of qualifying companies and expected buyers.

“From the very first time that we met the folks from Beacon they rose to the occasion, just from a value standpoint, understanding both segments of our business paratransit and school bus,” Koban said. “The CEO is down to earth; I can’t say enough about the whole presentation and listened to all the things that we felt made us special as a company, gave us the guarantees, which is what made us attractive to them and encourages us to do that.”

Koban said that they’re really looking forward to the future.

“It’s new to us, we’re still learning the system, and Joe has been great welcoming us as a group and all of our management,” Koban said.

Deneen Evans, board member asked why the board didn’t know about this with their current contract.

“Why didn’t we know until November that this was going to take place?” Evans said. “I thought it was a partnership. I didn’t know it was sold and it’s under new ownership, so it’s not a partnership, it’s a new owner. So, I don’t know, should we have known about it and be able to vote if we wanted to keep this company?”

“I just feel this information was kept away from the board members; we should have the chance to say no,” Evans added. “I understood it to be a partnership, not a new ownership. Even though you’re keeping the same name, it’s a new ownership, and we as a board should have been told about that.”

“There’s no way I can say this without someone taking it the wrong way,” Koban said. “You and I have had this conversation many times; contractually, we didn’t have to, and overall from a confidentiality standpoint of going through the process, it was a whole new experience that I don’t think I want to go through again.”

“We got through it; there was a lot more legal minds than me that looked through the contract and the language in the contract,” he added. “It wasn’t just we were going to sell to anybody; we had advisors, and there was a team of attorneys on the buyer’s side.”

Matt Kengersky, board president, said that Knox Law researched the assignability clause and didn’t find any issues.

Evans said that’s all she wanted to know.