GENESEO, NY — Livingston County’s newest white collar employer is Coast Professional, Inc., which opened its new office building at 4273 Volunteer Road on Oct. 15.

Recently, The County News was invited to visit the facility and interview company executives Everett Stagg and Roxanne Baker. Stagg is president and COO. Baker is vice president of operations.

Geneseo is the most recent of three Coast Professional sites in the United States.

The others are in West Monroe, Louisiana and Anaheim, California. Established in the early 1970s, Coast Professional does only recovery of educational receivables — a speciality it has pursued to the exclusion of other kinds of collections work. Coast Professional’s clients are lending institutions, education institutions and government agencies who need to recover student loans in default.

In the case of the Geneseo office, there is one client: the federal government. The efforts of the current staff of 29 persons are entirely directed at federal student loans which have gone unpaid.

Being engaged in such work, Coast Professional is in fact working for the taxpayers of the United States, Stagg noted. The funds Coast Professional is able to recover become available for the present generation of college students, to finance their academic studies.

Coast Professional is one of five firms nationwide who have won a “small business” contract with the federal government, whereby the firm is provided with a limited list of individuals from whom it may attempt to negotiate loan settlements.

As a contractor to the federal government, Coast Professional pays the federal wage standard for our region: about $13 an hour plus a benefit package worth $3.35 an hour.

That is more than double the minimum wage starting salary prevalent for retail, agriculture or industrial jobs here. Employees work a 40 hour week in a 8 a.m.-to-9 p.m. time frame. The staff does not work on weekends and, in fact, everyone is out by 4:30 on Fridays.

Complete story appears in our Feb. 4 print edition.

Tagged as: Coast Professional