Sunshine Rides: 34 Years of NEMT Growth on the Western Slope

Sunshine Rides of Colorado:

35 Years of Grit, Growth, and Giving Back on the Western Slope

By NEMT Entrepreneur Staff

February 2026  |  Grand Junction, Colorado

In the NEMT industry, the providers who earn the most respect are rarely the ones with the biggest fleets or the flashiest technology. They’re the ones who show up—day after day, year after year—in the places where showing up is hardest. For more than three decades, Sunshine Rides of Colorado has been doing exactly that across the rugged Western Slope, turning a small-town taxi operation into one of the most respected NEMT providers in the Mountain West.

From Oil Town Taxi to Western Slope Institution

The story of Sunshine Rides begins in 1991, when Elizabeth Williams—known to everyone as “Willy”—launched a taxi company in Grand Junction, Colorado. At the time, Grand Junction was still very much an oil and gas town, and the private transportation business was dominated by men. Williams didn’t care. She built her company on two unshakeable principles: treat your employees like family, and care deeply about every single passenger. Those values weren’t just words on a wall. They became the operational DNA of the business.

When Williams’s son, Kelly Milan, took the reins in 2001, he made a deliberate decision to honor his mother’s legacy while evolving the company for a changing market. The population of Colorado’s Western Slope was growing. Healthcare access was becoming a more pressing community concern. Medicaid transportation was emerging as a critical need—and Milan saw the opportunity to make Sunshine Rides an essential part of the region’s healthcare infrastructure.

Today, NEMT accounts for roughly 80% of Sunshine Rides’ business, with the company specializing in Medicaid “SS ” medical transportation and Home and Community Based Services (HCBS) rides. The operation has grown from a handful of drivers to a team of over 150 people, with a modern fleet of cars and vans running 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.

The Rural NEMT Challenge: When Your Service Area Is the Size of a Small Country

If you’ve never driven Colorado’s Western Slope, it’s hard to appreciate the scale of the challenge Sunshine Rides navigates daily. The region stretches from the Utah border east to the Continental Divide, encompassing Mesa, Delta, Montrose, and Garfield Counties and beyond. Mountain passes that close without warning in winter. Distances between population centers measured in hours, not minutes. Patients in remote communities who need to travel to Grand Junction—or even Denver—for specialized medical care.

For rural NEMT providers, every trip is a logistics puzzle that urban operators never have to solve. A dialysis patient in Craig needs to get to a treatment center over 150 miles away. A Medicaid beneficiary in Telluride needs a ride to a specialist in Montrose through a mountain pass. An HCBS client in Palisade needs consistent, recurring transportation to community programs. Weather, road conditions, and sheer geography add layers of complexity that can’t be solved with better routing algorithms alone.

Sunshine Rides has met these challenges through a combination of deep local knowledge, operational flexibility, and a willingness to say yes when other providers say no. When the state suspended its contract with MedRide in early 2025 over fraudulent paperwork issues, Sunshine Rides was among the companies that stepped up to absorb displaced Medicaid passengers across the Western Slope—providing service from communities as remote as Craig and Steamboat Springs, often with suggested advance booking of just 24 to 48 hours.

“Transportation is a barrier for almost everybody, on every level.”

— Philip Masters, Sunshine Community

How Sunshine Rides Has Differentiated Itself

A Multi-Modal Model Built for Resilience

One of the smartest strategic decisions Sunshine Rides has made is refusing to be just one thing. While NEMT is the core business, the company also operates taxi, shuttle, charter, airport transportation, event transportation, sightseeing, and long-distance services. This diversification isn’t just a revenue play—it’s a survival strategy for a rural provider. When Medicaid reimbursement rates are tight (and they always are), the commercial side of the business helps keep vehicles moving and drivers employed. When tourism surges in the summer and ski season, Sunshine Rides can flex its fleet to capture that demand. The result is a more resilient business that can weather the cyclical pressures that sink single-service NEMT providers.

Technology That Meets Passengers Where They Are

Sunshine Rides has invested in technology in a way that makes sense for its passenger population. The company operates its own branded mobile app—available on both iOS and Android—that lets passengers book rides on demand or schedule them in advance. But recognizing that many Medicaid beneficiaries and elderly passengers aren’t comfortable with apps, Sunshine Rides maintains a robust phone and text booking system alongside the digital tools. You can call, text, or use the app - and healthcare and business partners have the added support of web booking. The company has also adopted modern fleet monitoring and dispatch technology, pairing it with data-driven reporting to maintain accountability and service quality across its sprawling service area.

Driver Culture as a Competitive Advantage

In an industry plagued by driver turnover, Sunshine Rides has built something genuinely rare: a team of professionals who stay. The company’s approach to driver retention traces directly back to Willy Williams’s founding principle of treating employees like family. Sunshine Rides provides industry-leading training, invests in driver development, and recognizes tenure in meaningful ways.

The company made headlines in 2022 when it awarded its first-ever Lifetime Achievement Award to driver Jay Harwood, who had been with the company for 31 years—since almost the very beginning. Operations Manager Eddie Calderon noted that in three decades, Harwood had never received a single complaint. That kind of loyalty and professionalism doesn’t happen by accident. It’s the product of a culture that values its people.

All Sunshine Rides drivers are background-checked and trained as certified transport specialists, a level of professionalism that distinguishes the company from gig-economy competitors who may technically offer rides but can’t match the consistency, safety, and sensitivity that NEMT passengers require.

Innovation at the Edges: Exploring New Frontiers in Medical Transport

Sunshine Rides isn’t content to simply do what it has always done. The company has been exploring new verticals that leverage its core competencies in sensitive medical transportation. In 2025, Sunshine Rides began developing a specialized transportation program for patients accessing Colorado’s Natural Medicine program, which includes psilocybin therapy sessions. The state requires that patients have a transportation plan and strongly recommends that they not drive themselves. Sunshine Rides recognized that their background-checked, trained drivers could provide a level of care and sensitivity that ride-hailing services simply can’t offer for patients in such vulnerable states.

The company leverages NEMTAC (Non-Emergency Medical Transportation Accreditation Commission) Transport Specialist training, the national best practice curricula for NEMT drivers serving patients in behavioral health and therapeutic settings. This kind of forward-thinking positions Sunshine Rides not just as a provider, but as an industry thought leader shaping how NEMT evolves to meet emerging healthcare needs.

Beyond the Ride: Sunshine Community and the Meaning of Social Impact

Perhaps the most striking thing about Sunshine Rides is what happens outside the vehicles. In late 2025, Kelly Milan partnered with United Way of Mesa County to launch Sunshine Community—a nonprofit organization dedicated to helping unhoused individuals make the transition from the streets to stable, independent housing.

Milan repurposed the company’s former buildings to create the Sunshine Community House, a transitional shelter with a structured daily program. Participants work with peer counselors, develop life skills, and follow individualized plans designed to move them toward independence within six to twelve months. And critically, Sunshine Rides provides free transportation to and from services, jobs, and appointments—removing the barrier that so often prevents homeless individuals from accessing the support they need.

The program launched in January 2026 with six participants and plans to expand to a maximum of 16. Executive Director Alexis Hitzeroth described a program that is deliberately personal and flexible, meeting each participant where they are in their journey rather than imposing a one-size-fits-all approach.

For the NEMT industry, this matters. Sunshine Community represents a model of how transportation companies—which sit at the intersection of healthcare access, social services, and community mobility—can extend their impact far beyond the ride itself. It’s the kind of social enterprise thinking that the industry needs more of.

The Growth Story: Building Slow and Building to Last

Sunshine Rides’ growth trajectory reads like a masterclass in patient, disciplined expansion. The company didn’t chase venture capital or try to scale overnight. It grew the way businesses grow in places like Grand Junction—steadily, through reputation, reliability, and relentless community engagement.

From a single-vehicle taxi operation in 1991 to a 150+ person organization serving communities across the entire Western Slope, the company has hit inflection points that would have broken lesser operators. The pandemic threatened to shut down the business entirely—but Sunshine Rides powered through, maintaining essential transportation for Medicaid patients who had no other options. The MedRide suspension in 2025 created a sudden surge in demand that Sunshine Rides absorbed by expanding its reach into communities like Craig and Steamboat Springs.

The company now operates across Grand Junction, Fruita, Palisade, Delta, Montrose, and Glenwood Springs, with long-distance capability to Aspen, Telluride, Vail, and Denver. It serves as a BBB-accredited business, a member of the Grand Junction Chamber of Commerce, and a licensed operator under the Colorado Public Utilities Commission. Kelly Milan has become an industry voice in his own right, speaking at the iCabbi Innovate 2024 conference alongside leaders from major national transportation companies and serving on the United Way of Mesa County’s leadership board.

“We have a large, diverse, good team of over 150 people serving the community. We’re just disgusted by what this person did, and we condemn it.”

— Kelly Milan, responding to a December 2024 incident involving a former employee, demonstrating the company’s commitment to accountability and values

Lessons for the NEMT Entrepreneur

Sunshine Rides offers several takeaways for NEMT providers at any stage of growth:

Diversify your revenue streams. A multi-modal model that blends NEMT with commercial taxi, shuttle, charter, and long-distance services creates resilience against the reimbursement and regulatory volatility that plagues single-service providers.

Invest in your people before your technology. Technology matters, but driver culture is the real competitive moat. A 31-year driver with zero complaints is worth more than any piece of software.

Think beyond the ride. The most differentiated NEMT companies are the ones that understand their role in the broader continuum of care and community health. Sunshine Community is a bold example of what that can look like.

Be the provider who says yes. In rural markets, reliability is the brand. When MedRide went down, Sunshine Rides stepped in. That kind of responsiveness builds the trust that sustains a business for decades.

Stay rooted in your community. Milan serves on nonprofit boards, the company is active in the Chamber of Commerce, and Sunshine Rides sponsors numerous community initiatives. That’s not just good PR—it’s how you become indispensable.

The Road Ahead

Thirty-five years in, Sunshine Rides is still growing, still innovating, and still finding new ways to serve. The launch of Sunshine Community signals that the company sees itself as more than a transportation provider—it sees itself as a community institution with a responsibility to use its resources, infrastructure, and expertise for broader social good.

For the NEMT industry, Sunshine Rides is proof that you don’t need to be in a major metro area to build something remarkable. You don’t need venture funding to grow sustainably. And you don’t need to choose between running a profitable business and making a genuine difference in people’s lives.

You just need to keep showing up. Willy Williams would be proud.

COMPANY SNAPSHOT: SUNSHINE RIDES OF COLORADO

Founded: 1991 by Elizabeth “Willy” Williams

Headquarters: Grand Junction, Colorado

Leadership: Kelly Milan, General Manager/Owner

Team Size: 150+ employees

Service Area: Statewide 

Services: NEMT (Medicaid SS), HCBS Transportation, Taxi, Shuttle, Charter, Airport, Long-Distance, Event, Sightseeing

Availability: 24/7/365 Scheduling — Phone, Text, App (iOS & Android), Web. For immediate service, call for availability.

Website: sunshinerides.com

Phone: 970-777-7777

Accreditations: BBB Accredited, Colorado PUC Licensed (Certificate No. 19429), Grand Junction Chamber of Commerce Member

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