Twelve months ago, things were looking bleak for Coordinated Transportation Solutions, a business based a stone’s throw away from City Hall on Ansonia’s Main Street.
The company — which coordinates non-emergency transportation for Medicaid patients — had just lost a contract with the state, and laid off about two-thirds of its 80 employees.
Fast forward a year and the picture couldn’t be any different. A new government contract in Maine will mean CTS can hire about 25 new employees — and the first people they’re calling were those they had to let go last year.
“We’re looking to see who’s available to bring back,” David White, the president and founder of CTS, said Wednesday (March 6). “A year later, many people fortunately have been able to find other employment, but we are talking to a number of our former employees and hope to see some of them back on Main Street before too long.”
White said that meant a lot since so many of those employees lived in Ansonia or nearby.
“We’ve always felt very much a part of the Valley,” White said. “We were very disappointed in what happened, but a year later, we’re coming back, we’re on the upswing again.”
What is CTS?
Coordinated Transportation Solutions, Inc. arranges and coordinates transportation for thousands of people using Medicaid.
The company, housed in the two-story office building at the corner of Main and Kingston streets, suffered last year because it lost a state contract involving arranging transportation for Medicaid recipients.
CTS had been providing the service to the state since about 2002 as a subcontractor through the Community Health Network of Connecticut.
White said the last year has been “challenging,” but pointed out plenty of other companies have been hurting as a result of the economy.
“We seem to be coming through it and landing on our feet and we are really excited about it,” he said.
New Business
The company’s new government contract with Maine, worth about $50 million over the course of two years, calls for CTS to manage nearly 2 million trips annually for 210,000 Maine residents who use Medicaid.
The company call center will be in Lewiston, Maine, and employ about 40 people. It had to be built there, according to the terms of the contract.
But the new business will allow CTS to bring back staff in Ansonia, too.
“All the back office work, the finance work, the claims department, our compliance department, our training is all going to be here,” said Donna Strigler, the company’s vice president of operations, March 6.
Which is great news — and plenty of work.
Walk into CTS’ third-floor office and you’ll be greeted by a white-board proclaiming the date and a countdown to the May 1 “Go live” date for the Maine contract.
“The challenge for us between now and May is get all our systems in place, our team brought in and hired and trained up,” White said.
He hopes that having all that in place will allow the company to grow quickly when more business comes down the pike.
“We’re only one of about a half-dozen companies that do this on a regional or national level,” White said. “While there’s some pretty stiff competition out there, these kinds of projects position CTS to grow further in New England and other states in the Northeast.”
The company hopes to land contracts in New York and Rhode Island in the coming weeks.
And, Strigler said, if the company is successful, those call centers will be based in Ansonia.
“If we get those two contracts, those people will be working out of here,” Strigler said. “And that would be a significant amount of people, probably as many as what we had before.”
In the long term the company wants to broaden even further, geographically speaking.
“I’m not sure we’re going to Idaho, but we certainly are looking at states like West Virginia, Pennsylvania, maybe Maryland, Delaware,” White said.
And any new business will obviously help the company hire more and more people — and base them in Ansonia.
White said it’s the least the company could do to pay back not only the employees, but the many officials that went to bat for CTS last year in an effort to avert the layoffs.
“They really worked very hard on our behalf in a very bipartisan way to work on the problem we found ourselves in,” White said, listing Ansonia Mayor James Della Volpe, state Sen. Joseph Crisco, and state Reps. Linda Gentile, (former state Rep.) Len Greene and Themis Klarides.
White said the officials’ involvement in the process helped the company land a $350,000 Small Business Job Creation Incentive Loan and matching grant from the state’s Department of Economic and Community Development.
The money allowed the company to update its computer systems, which White said helped land the company’s new contract in Maine.
Della Volpe said March 7 the company’s new contract was “great news.”
“I’m thankful for his commitment to Ansonia,” Della Volpe said of White. “It’s always good to have more people downtown.”
