SYRACUSE, N.Y. — The Travelers Companies, Inc. (NYSE: TRV), plans this spring to move its local office to a new, smaller facility in the Salina Meadows office park in Salina from its current home in the Galleries of Syracuse, a Travelers spokesman confirms. 

The employees will move to the new facility, located at 301 Plainfield Road in the office park, in May, says Matt Bordonaro, Travelers’ head of media relations, based in Hartford, Connecticut.

 “We are relocating to a nearby office building that better suits the employees,” he says. “We continue to be committed to the community there.”

The new office, which will have nearly 70 employees, will focus mainly on business insurance, Bordonaro says.

The move comes after Travelers reduced its Syracuse workforce — at the Galleries of Syracuse at 440 S. Warren St. — by about 70 percent in the last two years, eliminating about 160 local positions in its personal-insurance line of business, which includes auto coverage. The move, which was first announced in July 2013, was part of a broader effort to cut nearly 450 positions nationwide in personal insurance.

The company completed the last major portion of the Syracuse job reductions by September 2014, according to formal notices filed with the New York State Department of Labor.

“We made a decision to reduce expenses for personal insurance, including staffing at the location,” Bordonaro says,  “… [to] “improve our competitive position and pricing.”

He declines to provide square footage for the firm’s current and future offices.

The Travelers Companies on Jan. 22 reported total revenue of nearly $27.2 billion in 2014, up 4 percent from 2013. The insurer generated net income of nearly $3.7 billion last year, up 1 percent from 2013.