Ambulance firm eyes expansion Federal grant allows transition to larger facility in Madawaska

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MADAWASKA – Brad Lajoie and Derek Guerrette were putting the finishing touches on a side door of an ambulance Thursday at Autotronics Inc. while Chris Braley was finishing off a wall inside the new ambulance.

They are but three of 20 workers at the Frenchville site of the company that repairs, refurbishes and remounts ambulances, and builds new ones.

In the spring, the company will move to Madawaska into a facility that will be three times as large. The move will bring 20 new jobs to the central St. John Valley. The jobs are expected to be added over the next 18 months of operation, according to Paul Daigle, president of the company.

The move is being assisted with a $400,000 Community Development Block Grant acquired by the Madawaska Economic Development office Wednesday. The total project, Daigle estimated, will cost close to $1.5 million.

Autotronics also has a facility in Bangor, where seven service people work. They service and sell ambulances throughout New England and to the federal government.

“We are working on buying the former Ames complex,” Daigle said. “We want to expand our manufacturing base, and we just don’t have the facilities to be able to do it here.

“We built a prototype for a Type II ambulance last year, and we want to build two to four of them a week,” he said. “It’s been a 10-year project for me. A Type II ambulance is valued in the $50,000 range. It is used mostly for transport between medical facilities.

“It’s a big project, and I have been working on it for a long time,” Daigle said.

Daigle is the most recent owner of Autotronics, a third-generation company started by his grandfather and father in the late 1950s. Back then, the company rebuilt electrical systems for all kinds of vehicles. The facility expanded into electronics over the years, and went into the ambulance business a decade ago.

The company was incorporated in 1981, and Daigle took over the operation last year.

“We want to expand what we are doing now,” Daigle said sitting in his office at Frenchville. “We rebuild, refurbish and remount ambulance units, and we are also a franchise distributor of ambulances.

Daigle and his workers manufactured a prototype Type II ambulance last spring. It has been tested locally and accepted in the industry. It will go through federal testing within a couple of months.

Besides the one prototype, Daigle’s crews are working on two more units. He hopes to manufacture four ambulance units a week when the transfer to larger facilities is completed in Madawaska.

“We are making our own [ambulances] on truck chassis,” he said.

“I’ve been working on this project for ten years. … We finally got it together last fall, and we’ve done local testing,” he said.

“After we started making the prototype, we outgrew the facilities we have in 60 days,” he said.

His present base of operations is in two buildings, a total of 15,000 square feet, along Route 1, some four miles from Madawaska. They will move into a facility that has 57,000 square feet of space.

He expects to build two units a week, of the Type II ambulance, when they are operational. The ideal would be four units a week.

It’s the first time in 20 years that ambulances are being built in New England. It’s the first time in Maine. The New England facility that stopped 20 years ago was in Massachusetts.

Daigle said his market area is in Maine, Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Rhode Island as well as the federal government.

They also repair and refurbish Type I and Type III ambulances, larger units used in the emergency medical services industry.

“They are new units when they come out of here,” Daigle said of the refurbished units.

Besides mechanics, the company has metal fabrication people, electronics personnel, and even a carpenter who builds the interior units of the ambulances.

They do most of the work on site. They contract for services they don’t have.

The company still services local industries with electrical and electronics services.

The $400,000 CDBG grant is the second one Madawaska has acquired in two months.

“Isn’t it great,” Suzie Paradis, Madawaska’s economics development office director, said Wednesday night. “Nearly $1 million in just five months.”

Madawaska acquired a $500,000 CDBG grant last month to repair two streets. Paradis started working for the town last October.