CDL Truck Driving School Shutters Operations, Files for Bankruptcy

Pacific NW Professional Driving School, doing business as Toro Trucking Academy, filed a Chapter 7 petition, which means it is seeking to wind down operations and liquidate its assets, Wednesday in the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Western District of Washington.

A company representative blamed the closure on "all the market forces that are happening in the industry today."

"Increasing regulations that just get worse and worse and harder and harder to do business" the spokesperson for Toro Trucking Academy, who didn't want to be named, told FreightWaves. "You've got the industry economic situation, and fuel prices [in the Pacific Northwest] have more than doubled. Then you have personnel costs and trying to operate in states like Washington and Oregon that are unfriendly to businesses. That all adds up and it just crushes you over time."

In the petition, Ryan Kling, who is listed as owner and president, states that while his lot lease to store the company's tractors and trailers is paid through May, the trucking school's property insurance policy expired in March and the carrier would not renew it. 

Toro Trucking Academy had 11 drivers and 13 power units at the time of its closure, according to the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration's SAFER website, but has trained thousands of professional drivers over the past 10 years.

The company stopped posting images of its CDL graduates on its social media platforms in early April. The website for the trucking school's locations in Tacoma, Kent and Portland no longer works.

"We didn't leave anyone hanging out there in the middle of training, so we were intentional about when we closed" the company spokesperson told FreightWaves. "We had an agreement with another CDL school if there were any students that needed anything after we closed. All of the students were taken care of and got their CDLs."

In its filing, Toro Trucking Academy lists its assets as between $100,000 and $500,000 and its liabilities as between $1 million and $10 million. The petition states the company has up to 49 creditors and maintains that funds will be available for distribution to unsecured creditors.

The petition says the company is involved in two pending legal actions, including a breach-of-contract lawsuit filed against it in King County Superior Court. The company is also awaiting the results of an audit conducted by the Washington State Department of Revenue.

Among the company's top creditors with nonpriority unsecured loans are Bank of America in El Paso, Texas, owed more than $68,000, and Chase Card Services of Wilmington, Delaware, owed nearly $57,000.

The petition states that First Business Bank of Madison, Wisconsin, has a security interest of around $1.2 million in multiple pieces of equipment. 

The carrier's gross revenues from Jan. 1 until its bankruptcy filing date were around $490,000. Its petition states the company made about $1.7 million in 2023 and nearly $2.3 million in 2022.

As of publication, J. Todd Tracy, the trucking school's bankruptcy attorney, had not responded to FreightWaves' request for comment.

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