SYRACUSE — The expansion of POMCO Group’s headquarters in Syracuse is on pace to wrap up by March. POMCO broke ground on the addition to its building at 2425 James St. in the city’s Eastwood section in early 2012. Construction crews are adding about 18,000 square feet of space over two floors to the building, […]
SYRACUSE — The expansion of POMCO Group’s headquarters in Syracuse is on pace to wrap up by March.
POMCO broke ground on the addition to its building at 2425 James St. in the city’s Eastwood section in early 2012. Construction crews are adding about 18,000 square feet of space over two floors to the building, which had stood at just over 77,000 square feet before the start of work.
The enlarged building will have some space for retail businesses. But the primary purpose of the increased square footage is to give POMCO more space for current employees and new employees. The company, which specializes in administering employee benefits like medical, dental, and disability benefits for self-funded health and risk-management plans, will need the space, according to its marketing manager, Eboni Britt.
“In addition to gaining new clients, which is the norm each year for us, we have a couple of new initiatives that we’re working on that have led to our office expanding,” she says. “We are partnering with a health-insurance company that will give us an opportunity to offer some fully insured plans. That’s an initiative for 2013.”
The partnership should be in place by the end of the first quarter of this year or the beginning of the second quarter, Britt adds. But she declines to offer any more details at this time.
POMCO is also working to prepare to administer the benefits for the first Consumer Operated and Oriented Plan (CO-OP) in New York. CO-OPs, nonprofit health-insurance plans that aim to offer affordable insurance to individuals and small businesses, are called for in every state under the 2010 federal health-care reform law.
In May, POMCO announced that it had been selected to administer the CO-OP by Brooklyn–based Freelancers Union, a 170,000-member national nonprofit organization of independent workers. Freelancers Union sponsors the new CO-OP in New York.
The plan is slated to start accepting enrollment this fall with coverage starting at the beginning of 2014. Freelancers Union and POMCO have estimated the CO-OP will cover 100,000 people in the state within seven years.
If it does so, POMCO could add as many as 100 employees over that time period. It has hired for 27 new positions in the last year and currently employs 400 people, with 340 being in Syracuse.
“We’ve been hiring pretty steadily,” Britt says. “We just completed a training class that has 18 people who just came onboard.”
Beken Contracting Services LLC of Syracuse is the general contractor for the project enlarging POMCO’s James Street building, while the Syracuse architect Robert Abbott is its architect. POMCO is not sharing expansion costs or sources of financing.
POMCO generated $51 million in administrative revenue in 2011. Its premium equivalents that year exceeded $1 billion. Its senior executive vice president, Donald Napier, said in May that the firm was projecting 8 percent to 10 percent revenue growth in 2012.
In addition to its headquarters in Syracuse, POMCO has offices in Albany, Binghamton, Buffalo, Rochester, Watertown, Westchester, and New York City. It was founded in 1978 and has a health and dental division, risk-management division, employee-benefit statements division, and commercial-services division.
Contact Seltzer at rseltzer@cnybj.com