Cool in Colorado: Retirement Security Meets Diversity, What Next?

Hunter Railey is a passionate and accomplished advocate for small business and retirement readiness. Today, we’re talking with Hunter about his experience so far bringing Colorado’s pioneering state-run savings plan from the idea stage to implementation. 

There are lessons here for all of us about promoting financial security across the unexpectedly diverse population of the Centennial state and beyond.

Hunter, you are the Director of the Colorado Secure Savings Program. What was it about this role that caught your eye?

In 2018, I was working with the Colorado small business community on the advocacy side.  Over several years, we helped promote the idea of a state-sponsored workplace savings plan, which eventually evolved into Colorado’s Secure Savings Program. Then the director role popped up. I’m really happy to be following the program from its infancy as an initial idea all the way through to implementation.  It’s not an opportunity that a lot of people get, and it’s been very rewarding.

Tell us a little bit about the population you expect to cover in Colorado.

From the start, we knew we’d be dealing with a challenging population. Our research showed us that a little over 900,000 people would be subject to the program.  And if you include some of the other pieces that made it into the bill, like creating a pathway for self-employed 1099 and seasonal workers, that number gets closer to 1.3 million people. Taken as a whole, that’s slightly over half of the state’s entire working-age population. That means about one in two people you encounter daily are likely not saving for retirement and will need access to the program.  So that’s a big number.

The challenge in Colorado is this population is very spread out.  Like many states, we have some densely populated metro areas.  Those individuals are easier to reach.  But we also have some very rural parts of the state that don’t even have high-speed broadband internet yet.

On top of that, the state is surprisingly diverse.  One zip code in Aurora, for example, was recently considered to be the most diverse in the entire country. If you can believe it, we speak over 100 languages in this state. 

We also have large refugee immigrant communities. Colorado is also unique because we have a relatively large Hispanic and Latino populations in rural areas. Some of those folks arrived within the last generation, but others were here before Colorado was even part of the United States. So, we’ve got a lot of different people with differing needs that we’re trying to incorporate into this program.

From my standpoint, that makes it all the more critical that we make the program simple, accessible, and easy to use.  That’s the only way we’re going to get people to trust it and use it. 

Wow, we hadn’t realized the extent of Colorado’s diversity. 

Yes, and it’s likely to get more so, especially since we’re receiving a large number of Afghan refugees from the U.S. withdrawal. We’ve welcomed refugees before -- for example, we have a Somali Bantu population here.  I’ve worked with them and what’s unique is that they don’t even have a written language. It’s all spoken.

Contrast all that with the traditional mindset that Colorado is a western state with a cowboy mentality. People forget that we used to be part of Mexico, and some of those folks never left the state.

We have legacy families who have been living in farming communities for centuries at this point. And they all contribute, they all matter. We want to create something that will work for them as much as any new immigrant or new resident to the state who’s just looking to find work. And that’s the challenge. That’s also likely to be the most interesting aspect of building out and marketing this program.

Absolutely! So you’re moving toward a 2022 launch.  What’s the current focus of your implementation plan?

Things are moving fast. We just got through a board meeting where we settled some of the initial design considerations.  Now, we start piecing together solicitations.  We’ve relied heavily on what we’ve heard from other states on what worked, what didn’t, and what they would do differently next time. 

So here at the start of the process we’re touching base with vendors, getting a sense of what they’re offering, how they view their role, and their interest in participating.  The focus between now and the end of the year is going to be getting solicitations together for the program administrator piece in particular, as well as for investment managers.

Moving into 2022, the focus will be onboarding vendors, ensuring our systems work, and executing an initial marketing and outreach strategy.  We’ll also look to find pilot participants for the October launch.

On top of that, we just announced that we’re taking steps to pursue a partnership with New Mexico.  This is an exciting development, but it throws a wrinkle into our plans.  Now we need to consider two states, not just one.  But I think this mentality will benefit the program overall as we develop infrastructure and a set of governance principles to help both populations.

This is the first time we’re seeing two states actually sit down together and really start to figure out how this can work.

Precisely.  Particularly because both states have authorized an auto-enrollment program, this is a significant development.  Essentially, from a policy perspective, we’re really creating an infrastructure to automatically connect consumers to goods and services that they don’t have easy access to, but need.

Whether you’re an employer who didn’t start a plan because of the complexity involved, or you’re a worker who found the massive volume of private-sector choices overwhelming -- we’re just trying to simplify the entire process for everybody. 

Looking at the region we’re sitting in right now, one of our primary considerations has to be that you have the population to support the program.  Particularly in this middle part of the country, we have a lot of less densely populated areas. The mentality then becomes how do we create a program that applies to everyone? 

In this case, the program has to be as applicable to New Mexico as it is to Colorado, or even later to surrounding states that may not have enough people for vendors to take a real interest.  Regardless, we and the other states still want to offer a very valuable service to our working population.  Together, we should have more options. 

Big picture, what else do you see as your top challenges, and how are you approaching them?

Okay, let me start small and work up to the big ones.  First, one challenge for me personally has been that this is my first role in government, and I started working in the middle of the pandemic.  We were all primarily working remotely, so learning government by Zoom has continued to be a series of lessons for me. This remote work creates communications challenges when we’re trying to tackle something so big and so new.

Second, we’re in a situation now where the workload has increased.  So really trying to move this significant endeavor forward while being thoughtful and respectful of everybody’s schedules has been tough.  In many ways, this hybrid work landscape has been both a blessing and a curse as it’s brought out weaknesses early on so we can address them faster.

One thing has helped -- there are now three state programs up and running (Oregon, Illinois, and California). That means lessons have been learned already on many fronts, and everyone has been good at sharing those. 

Regarding participating vendors, we’re evaluating what needs to go into program rules, and is it going to work for everybody?  How do we make these solicitations work? How do we onboard our program administrators? How do we onboard our investment managers? And how do we make sure that we’re meeting statutory requirements when trying to maintain momentum and hustling to roll this program out?  So these other directors’ experience is really priceless in helping us navigate all these issues. 

What’s interesting, and of course, extremely challenging, is that this program needs to stand the test of time.  In theory, it is going to exist in perpetuity. So that means we need to be extra thoughtful about who we engage, how we engage them, and when we engage them.

That has been our biggest challenge.  We’ve learned so far that this also requires patience since it might just take some folks a little bit of time to be convinced that this is a program worthy of their participation.  So we’ve got to understand that and be ready to accommodate them at that point.   

It is a collaborative space that we find ourselves working in. What do you find to be most beneficial to your progress?

Yes, the supportiveness of everyone involved in this effort, here and in other states, is remarkable. I’m just beginning to scratch the surface on how to best leverage the people power we have available.  Having the opportunity to touch base with the other state directors has been massively beneficial, both to the project and me personally.  As I think most of us have seen since 2020, working remotely can make you feel like you’re alone on an island with the weight of the world on your shoulders.  Being able to call somebody and have them say, “Oh, yeah, it seems like a big deal, but this is how we tackled it.” -- that helps me move forward faster and equally, helps me understand that today’s problem is not the end of the world. 

The regular meetings with Georgetown (the Georgetown Center for Retirement Initiatives) are helpful, too, to get a sense of where the rest of the country is at and how they’re thinking about it.  Once we can travel again, I’m looking forward to conferences and meeting folks in person to further open up the communication channels.

I think the biggest help so far has been Dave Young, our State Treasurer.  Having an elected official who is grabbing the bull by the horns and seeing this as an opportunity to improve financial outcomes is a big deal.  It helps to have someone sitting at the top of the org chart wanting to get this done -- it helps us get past obstacles faster. 

We’re talking in October, and we heard you’ve got some fun plans for Halloween.

We just had our first child at the end of September. Since I’m still early on the Dad learning curve, I’m still learning the ropes on these types of priorities.  We’re going to go shopping this weekend to see what’s out there. But between my wife and I, our daughter, and our English cream golden retriever, I think a team theme will be needed, so we’ll be looking for matching costumes. 

That sounds like a prudent strategy.

Thank you so much for sharing your experience and process, Hunter Railey. Readers, want more? You can connect directly with Hunter here. You can follow his work on the Colorado Secure Savings Program here. You can also connect with Hunter on LinkedIn.