Christie Calls For Elimination Of Vacation And Sick Time Payouts For Public Workers

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

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

However, the plan would have little effect on East Brunswick since it has had something similar on the books since 1986.

“In June 1986 we put in a contract limitation for sick time pay ours,” said Lou Neely, head of the township Finance Department. “Prior to that we could accumulate…what he wants to do was already done through the governing body through collective bargaining.

Neely said there are 28 employees who were hired prior to June 1, 1986 who can still accumulate sick time, four who are retiring this year.

Liabilities for unused sick and vacation day benefits total more than $825 million statewide, Christie said. Locally, East Brunswick would have to pay $6.1 million in total if every one of its employees got sick and used their sick time at once.

“That’s if everybody were to go out immediately,” said Neely. “Not everyone is gong to get sick all at once…it’s an absolutely phony number.”

However, not every municipality has negotiated away accumulated sick time.

 “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," he said.

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.