Christie: Eliminate Sick and Vacation Time Payouts; Collingswood Mayor: Not So Fast

Gov. Chris Christie urged the Legislature on Thursday to pass his plan to eliminate vacation and sick time payouts for retiring public employees.

Joined by a bevy of mayors at the armory in Teaneck, Christie said the payouts amount to “a going-away present to public employees who had the great good fortune of not being sick.”

Across the state, 234 mayors signed a statement supporting Christie’s efforts to reform the payout system. Collingswood Mayor Jim Maley was not among the signatories. He said the governor’s approach isn’t the right one.

“It definitely has to be reformed, but it’s not something that should just be removed,” Maley said. “It’s a part of employees’ compensation package when they were hired and it’s something public employees have been getting a long time. I don’t think it should just be cut off.”

Instead, Maley would like to see more incremental change that includes new parameters for new hires, much like the state has done with how public employees pay for health care coverage.

At the same time, Maley acknowledged, “it’s difficult to keep (the current system) afloat” with payouts looming over towns. A police officer or firefighter with decades on the job could get $80,000-$100,000 upon retiring, Maley noted. 

If every Collingswood employee retired today, the town would owe $1,187,817.68 in unused sick and vacation time, according to the New Jersey Department of Community Affairs.

Liabilities for unused sick and vacation day benefits total more than $825 million statewide, Christie said. Camden County owes its pubic workers $23.2 million in unused time, according to the governor’s office. That amounts to 54,981 days of time owed.

“Every tax dollar that’s used to cash out unused sick and vacation days is a dollar that should be going to limit a tax increase and be sent right back to the taxpayer,” Christie said. “The only way to deal with property taxes is the lessen the amount we spend.”

Christie called on the Legislature to take action during the remaining 30 days of the lame duck session. The Legislature has approved a $15,000 cap on the payouts and Democrats have proposed scaling it back to a $7,500 cap.

Christie, however, said the payouts must be scrapped altogether.

“These numbers have no bearing to anything that’s real,” he said. “They’re just picking out numbers as a gift to public employees for not being sick.”

He said the argument made by some opponents of the reform—that employees would start using sick days as time off—is without merit.

“I can’t believe that we’re not going to do a common sense reform because we say we can’t control fraud,” Christie retorted.

State Sen. Loretta Weinberg, who sat in on the press conference, said Democrats have made attempts to work with Christie.

“As with most things the governor brings up, reality is often a little more complex than his rhetoric,” Weinberg said in a statement.

“We need to ensure that in our rush to reform the system, we do not push long-time workers to the exit. If we do, local governments will be faced with having to pay all of those retiring workers now, inadvertently putting themselves in an even more tenuous fiscal position,” she said.

Christie called the reform a “common sense” measure and stressed the bipartisan support of 234 mayors across the state.

The Camden County signatories included the mayors Berlin Borough, Berlin Township, Camden City, Cherry Hill, Chesilhurst, Gloucester City, Haddon Heights, Haddonfield, Stratford and Waterford.