Ed Dressel  0:09 
Hi. This is Ed Dressel with Pensionportal.com. Pensionportal.com is here to help employees appreciate the value of their state pension plan and help public entities recruit, and retain employees. For my first podcast, I have Matt Mejia from Malheur, Oregon and Malheur ESD, Educational Service District. He works in conjunction with a number of school districts, and he's the business office there. Matt, wonderful to have you today.

Matt Meija  0:35 
Yes. Thanks for having me, Ed.

Ed Dressel  0:36 
Do you want to tell everybody a little bit about Malheur ESD? A little bit about your unique setting and about yourself?

Matt Meija  0:44 
So at our ESD, most people ask where we're at and they say, "Are you over by Bend?" So we usually throw out that we're about 50 miles from Boise, Idaho, and then they kind of understand that. So in our ESD, we take care of Juntura, Arock, Huntington, Annex, Adrian, Ontario, Vale and Nyssa are all inside of our ESD realm. But financial wise, we do Mahler ESD and then a couple small districts, like Arock, Juntura, Huntington and Annex, are who we do the books for.

Ed Dressel  1:18 
I want to learn a little bit about you. So tell me how big is the ESD?

Matt Meija  1:22 
So right now, currently, we have 94 employees. When I first started back in 2012 we had about 30 employees, so we've grown about 60 more employees, but we've also added a bunch of new products that we didn't have before. We have an early learning center that takes care of EICSC students. We have Perkins, which is CT stuff. We have STEM and then we also look into like specialized services, like speech pathologist, occupational therapists and all that specialized stuff is what, kind of what our ESD is kind of known for.

Ed Dressel  1:58  
So you're serving rural Oregon and really helping some of the smaller districts with services they otherwise would probably not have.

Matt Meija  2:05 
Yeah. So we're able to leverage our dollars in our, I guess, local service plan to give--we can hire a full time person that can be partialed out to these rural districts that they would not have if they had to hire themselves.

Ed Dressel  2:18  
So tell us a little bit about yourself. You've been there since 2012 and you're the business officer.

Matt Meija  2:24 
So I started here in 2012 was actually the HR manager, and did the books for Huntington and Annex. And then I had someone else that was the business manager that ran the ESD as well as Gunter and Arock. And then in 2017 that person left, and so I took over for the ESD and have been running it ever since.

Ed Dressel  2:47 
So you serve as the Director of Finance, and we introduced Pensionportal to you about what, four or five months ago?

Matt Meija  2:55 
Yeah. So we chatted up in Bend at the or OR ASBO Summer Conference, and that kind of spearheaded it, and then we had staff come back in August and kind of pushed it out, and it's kind of just taken off since then.

Ed Dressel  3:09 
We were excited. I don't know what you did internally. I haven't asked you this question. We did it with a subset of your employees, and we had, initially, over 90% of them log in really quickly. Tell me about how you were initially promoting it and got that level of participation.

Matt Meija  3:26  
So we promoted it pretty much the day that we had everyone come back. We were talking about this new financial gadget that could have shown their PERS and stuff. And we also have a monthly meeting where we explain it again that we have this offered, and then with the Google one sign in, it's been really helpful for them not to have to remember another password for something else. So they were able to just go in through there. And it's been seamless, as far as I've heard.

Ed Dressel  3:52 
And what was the initial response when people heard about it? What were their thoughts?

Matt Meija  3:57 
Alot of them--like we've talked in the past--alot of them thought tier one, tier two was kind of the best, and everyone else that was under there didn't have a very good pension. And once they inputted all their data and realized that, wow, this is actually a pretty good pension, and it really kind of, I guess, excited the staff members that were in the opposite kind of thing, and they're happy to work for the SD--

Ed Dressel  4:24  
So for people listening that may not be in the state of Oregon. In Oregon, you have Tier 1 and Tier 2, and then they didn't name the next tier, Tier 3. They call it OPSRP, which is a little confusing, but OPSRP kind of gets dissed. Employees think it doesn't have the value of Tier 1 or Tier 2, and they feel like they've got a second class. They don't realize it's still the envy of the private sector.

Matt Meija  4:48 
Yeah, exactly, I think. As you can see everywhere, pensions are kind of being taken away, so everyone's starting to have to put into a 401(k). So I think there's a little misunderstanding on what a pension actually is. And we get the newer employees that come, maybe straight out of college or come from the 401(k) profession. So this has also helped kind of educate them on that stuff as well.

Ed Dressel  5:10 
So did you talk to any employees, and what was their individual response?

Matt Meija  5:14 
So I reached out to all of our employees, but two that kind of stuck out to me was we have this one SLPA, which is a speech pathologist close about 5-10, years from retirement. Didn't really know where they're at with the retirement and what this Pensionportal kind of assured them that they are definitely going to have enough money on the pension side when they want to retire at the full age. And so that was exciting for that person, and maybe they'll stay for longer, but it at least gave them the clarity that they could retire when their years of service are left. And then the other one I just spoke to was a newer employee. Didn't really know--right out of college--didn't really understand what the pension and all that stuff was and with the software, it kind of helped explain, here's what your pension is, and then it allowed her to, if she wanted extra, she could put into a 457, or another plan through the ESD that we offer. So we've had kind of two at the beginning of the career and one towards the end of the career that we're super excited about what the product was able to offer.

Ed Dressel  6:22 
And overall, how's the response been?

Matt Meija  6:24 
Collectively, really well. We've had probably about 10% more increase into a 457 plan, or 403(b), where this product pretty much told them, if they needed extra money on what kind of lifestyle they wanted. And so that's been allowing them to be proactive and then then reactive. So it's really helped with with that increase too.

Ed Dressel  6:48 
Tell me what challenges your ESD faces in a rural setting. Specifically, what are the challenges you may have there?

Matt Meija  6:57 
Our biggest challenge is where we offer the specialty services of like speech pathologist counselors, there just isn't many that are coming from this area. Like our speech pathologists have to take online classes with Idaho State, and so that's challenging. And then the private sector, with all those specialty services, it just pays a lot more on the salary side that we can actually offer. So this pension thing has actually helped leverage that, seeing that they're not having to have to put into a 401(k) which would be probably be their own money, and this is all employer paid pension.

Ed Dressel  7:34 
One of the pages that we showed, one of the calculations we provide, is the total projected payout over their life expectancy. You probably saw your number. How did you respond initially? Or how did your employees respond after seeing their values?

Matt Meija  7:51 
I think they're shocked, because a lot of them don't work in the whole finance and understand kind of all that money side of things, so when they see that number, that really excited a lot of them, because they're like, "Wow, that's a big number."

Ed Dressel  8:05 
There's a reason that pension systems are so expensive, and it's the investment in the future. And most people don't realize, hey, this is going to be worth a whole lot. Do you think, based on the story you shared with the younger person, do you think Pensionportal could be used with recruiting employees?

Matt Meija  8:23 
I would think so, because for most of the ones that come out of college, they don't really know what they don't know. And so I think this could be a thing to leverage and say, "Hey, come work for us." Yes, it might be a lower pay, but this pension here is going to pay dividends down the road where, if you go work private, you're going to worry about your private insurance. There's a lot of factors that can play into. I feel like this product is definitely going to be a recruiting tool that we could use.

Ed Dressel  8:53 
And if somebody hits their 40s or 50s and thinking, "You know what, I want to try private sector for a while," do you believe it'll be useful for retaining those employees who thought maybe they jump into the private sector?

Matt Meija  9:05  
I think so. Oregon has a grow your own program, so we've been able to tap into some of that money, and so we've been able to pay for their college, which is kind of a big thing for some of those private or specialty services that they're doing. And so I think that's what pushes them a lot of the time out of schooling, is because they have such a big bill in the student loan, and if we paid for it, that might, that'll help with the burden.

Ed Dressel  9:30 
So the general response from being in the software by your employees?

Matt Meija  9:34 
Overall, I'd say they love it, and it's been--this is probably the first year we've actually had more questions about PERS, 403(b)'s and 457 than we've had in the past.

Ed Dressel  9:47  
So they're more engaged. Have you seen a change of morale?

Matt Meija  9:50 
We usually have a pretty happy group. So I guess it's hard to tell off that, because it's some pretty awesome people that work for us already. And. I think this is just another way to make them more appreciative of the place they would interact with.

Ed Dressel  10:05 
As a business officer in another state, about the rural school districts and one of the frustrations they had was losing employees to the private sector. Is that a fear that you have private sector throwing money in front of them?

Matt Meija  10:18  
Yeah, every couple years we lose some employees to the private sector for what if they want to make more money? But I think with this product that we didn't have the product before. I think with this is showing them kind of the benefit of the pension, and I think maybe we could have kept some of those people if we had this before.

Ed Dressel  10:37 
So using the site, what are the comments in using the portal, or people talked about, you know, the data entry people think of financial planning is pretty difficult. What are the comments back from using the site and understanding the output?

Matt Meija  10:51 
Most of them were seamless. The biggest thing with them was trying to get their statement. A lot of them have never had an account with PERS so you have to get, like, a pin number. And so that took a while for them, but once they got that, that was fine. Any questions they really had, they're real simple questions, like, "What percentage should I put for what I want to retire with?" And "You guys put a good 80% in there." So that helps answer those questions. I think the nice thing about the product is it's user friendly and helps them kind of walk through it, where some other products might just be like, here's a bunch of steps, no real information on how to fill it out and hopefully get to the end and they just get frustrated at the end. And I don't think this product had any problems with that. It's been a good product. I'm glad we connected in Bend. I've been thinking about using it last year because I said in one of your--I think you presented the year before on the Pensionportal. I just kind of got busy with other stuff, so we're going to work on getting this out to our other districts that we serve and hopefully reap the benefit of what you guys are doing

Ed Dressel  12:01  
Matt, I really appreciate you taking the time todayxciting to hear about the benefits you're getting, and I wish you the best hope things go well for you, and thank you again.

Thank you.