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This is what City Hall East
been saying for Asbury
Park
Impose "use it or lose it" rules Published in the Asbury Park Press 03/4/05Spending keeps spiraling upward in Dover Township, where the Township Council in December signed off on a 20 percent increase in the municipal purposes portion of the tax rate. The latest piece of bad news for taxpayers: A $500,000 emergency appropriation to pay retiring employees for unused sick leave and vacation time.The council authorized the expenditure after the township comptroller reported that not enough had been budgeted in the terminal-leave account â a special and expensive feature of public-sector employment. A big chunk of that half-million will go to two longtime employees, recently retired Administrator/Clerk Barbara A. Iasillo and township Engineer Lawrence P. Cagliostro. Mayor Paul C. Brush said he didn't know how much each of the employees will receive or how many other retiring employees will tap the fund. He needs to find out. He owes township residents a full accounting at Tuesday's council meeting, if not before. A terminal-leave account sets the public sector apart from the private sector these days. Employees are allowed to carry over their sick and vacation time, a perk public agencies first offered when salaries for working at town hall were much lower than those in private industry. Even though the salary differential has largely disappeared, the benefit of accruing time remains. The "use it or lose it" rule in place in most of the private sector doesn't apply for public employees. Dover caps at 130 the number of sick and vacation days a retiring employee can cash in. But that can add up to a substantial farewell gift because the daily rate is calculated on the employee's present salary, not the wage from which the time was accrued. Taxpayers in Dover and elsewhere are being asked to support an extravagance they can no longer afford. Public officials need to recognize that and begin negotiating contracts that severely restrict the number of sick and vacation days employees are allowed to carry over from one year to the next. In Dover, it's too late to impose a "use it or lose it" rule regarding vacation and sick time for retirees this year. But it needs to change the rules as soon as it is contractually able to do so. The accrual policies for government employees at the state, municipal, county and school district level must be brought into line with the public sector. A retiring employee walks away with a handsome pension â funded in part by taxpayers â as a reward for years of public service. Supplementing that by cashing in unused sick and vacation time is a burden that taxpayers should not have to bear.
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