Updated: Ed Legrand’s Emails On PERS
Ed Legrand, head of the Mississippi Depertment of Mental Health and a member of the PERS Board of Trustees, forwarded an email earlier this morning signed by several Northeast Mississippi Democratic lawmakers and candidates promoting an event in Booneville this evening where they will talk about “the latest proposals to change the retirement system and our plans to protect benefits.”
This email was sent out exactly one minute after he forwarded these “GOP Attacks On MS PERS” talking points.
Here is the attached document if you’d like to see the Democratic talking points.
Update: After our original post, I received an email from Legrand. He said that he was not promoting partisan articles, but sending out as much information on the subject as possible. I had only received those emails promoting the Democratic side, but he included other emails as you can see below.
First, here is the email from Legrand:
“The premise of your blog entry alleging that I use my government email to promote “partisan events” is mistaken. I use this means to promote PERS related information and events, regardless of party affiliation. I have attached two emails from the past few days to illustrate this point (email from October 24, 2011, 9:06 a.m. regarding Republican pledges not to harm PERS and email from October 21, 2011, 11:48 a.m. with attached copies of a Majority in Mississippi article on PERS).
In my view the current situation involving PERS is not a partisan matter. All Mississippians, regardless of political stripe, should demand a strong public retirement system, including the approximately 380,000 taxpayers who are PERS members. Therefore, as a member of the PERS Board of Trustees elected by state employees and Executive Director of our largest state agency, I will continue to ensure that our employees, former employees and all other PERS members are informed of such matters concerning PERS as might fall within my knowledge and understanding.”
You can check out those other emails here.
A state employee using state resources on state time to advocate partisan politics. A reporter ought to FOIA all of Legrand’s communications with legislators regarding PERS to see how active he is in doing politics when he ought to be working for tax-payers.
If the GOP Gov and Lt Gov dont do something about this in January, there is no excuse.
comment on the update – In other words, if you have something you want to say about PERS, true (like the MIM piece) or false (like the attack talking points on Republicans) just send it to Ed.Legrand@dmh.state.ms.us and he will send it out to everyone for you.