On March 5, Evan Glass sent a letter, using his official designation, to the Executive Director of the Montgomery County Employee Retirement Plan. In the letter he says that Elon Musk has created the potential for widespread economic disruption in Montgomery County. Which on the surface is interesting in that what has actually caused the potential for widespread economic disruption is the County’s multi decade long neglect of building an economy not dependent upon federal tax dollars. Regardless, because of the risk Musk poses Evan wants to know what investments the Employee Retirement System (ERS) has made, and specifically if any of them are in Tesla or X (not a publicly traded company).
While we agree that knowing your investments is important, and there should be transparency in what a program invests in, Evan’s intent here is to advise that the ERS to not invest in companies that he is offended by or that might offend Montgomery County. This kind of logic leaves investors subject not to the financial advice of professionals that study a company and its potential to return an investment, but to a politician anxious to showcase their virtue. It wouldn’t be far-fetched for this to migrate to an argument of: The ERS should not invest in Amazon because it chose not to build a headquarter in Montgomery County.
If Evan dug around a little, he would find that the major investments of the ERS are indeed published. But then we wouldn’t get the glorious showcase of a letter to prove that he is unhappy with Musk.
On the surface you might be a bit misled by the term Employee Retirement System, thinking that it is a 401k offered to employees. It is not. It is the pension system for Montgomery County employees. Employees are required to contribute between 4-6% of their earnings. The County then provides a contribution. We were unable to find out what the % is.
However, what we did find is that elected officials such as Evan don’t participate in the ERS. They get their own special program called the Elected Officials Plan (EOP). This plan requires elected officials to contribute 4% of their earnings, while the county coffers will chip in an additional 8% of their earnings.
