Mayor Hope says service review analyzing C-K’s ‘core business’
A service review for Chatham-Kent got the go-ahead on Monday night.
Council approved a staff recommendation to take a comprehensive look at all municipal services.
Chatham-Kent Mayor Randy Hope says the review to look at the core business for Chatham-Kent.
“Find out what we are doing and how we can find efficiencies inside our organization… it’s going to be like a microscope approach,” he said. “Everybody is asking us to continue providing service without raising taxes, so we have to find what is our core business. So how can we find some savings to achieve these things to improve customer service.”
Hope added: “We have over 120 businesses units inside the Municipality, so it’s going to take some time to get done. We are hoping to achieve wins immediately, but we have go to also know that we are analyzing things properly because we have a very large community and we need to make sure the services are maintained throughout the community.”
Gerry Wolting, General manager of Corporate Services, has posted a community forum on inCK, in order to generate some feedback and information about this process.
Check out and log into this discussion right here.
Make sure to log on to inck.ca, as there is a discussion forum posted by GM Gerry Wolting… feedback is being gathered about the review process…
Check our previous stories on this topic:
Parsons: Service review an ‘exhaustive’, necessary process
Chatham-Kent conducting service review
Ex-Liberal
August 16, 2012 at 4:16 pm
Full time municipal employees at C-K get alloted a number of sick days(I believe it is 18 days per year)… PAID. And if they do not use them, they get to carry them forward from year to year. That is just SICK!(pardun the pun). I suspect the majority of the employees use these days as extra vacation days when they’re not sick at all. Just do the math for one employee earning $50,000.00 per year… that would be $193.00(earn in a day) X 18 days = $3,474.00 per year! That’s just one employee. And that’s ontop of the cushy vacation packages and benefits they get(I swear, getting a municipal job is like winning the lottery in this city). Not too mention the redundancy you see in the CK municipal work force. What a joke. Start your review their guys… and you’ll save the tax payers in CK a HUGE wad of cash.
Jennifer
August 16, 2012 at 7:32 pm
I know of one employee who told me himself that he has over 100 sick days saved up. This is ridiculous, why not put in some sort of “top up” program for employees who fall victim to a long term illness rather than just handing out free days.
Ridgetown resident
August 17, 2012 at 12:15 pm
there must be a lot of municipal employees reading these posts and giving a thumbs down to suggestions that they should not get all those “sick” days. Hopefully some decision-makers will put the voters first and amend this perk.
Michael Cowtan
August 18, 2012 at 12:23 pm
The whole “sick days” perk in the public service is just cause for regular citizens to get really mad. Be it teachers or public servants, it is one of those things that puts every other citizen against you, because we regular folks have never had such a thing and never will.
The blogosphere raises this issue at regular intervals, together with stories of teachers who effectively retire 9 months earlier on full pay because of their saved sick days. If I was a civil servant I would want to see this perk disappear just so that regular folk would not hate me so much.
Concerned citizen
August 17, 2012 at 4:51 pm
I am continually surprised by the amount of animosity towards Municipal employees from the general public in Chatham-Kent. As a relatively young person in her 30′s, perhaps I have been sheltered from the anger and distrust that amalgamation seems to have caused everyone else. I tend to embrace change a bit more openly, and try to work within the system to make improvements. As a former municipal employee, I experienced first-hand a constant barrage of negative comments from family, friends, and random community members – just because “I won the lottery”. When in fact, I went to school, got a good education, earned some skills, had a great number of life experiences, and then came back to CK to look for work. I applied to a number of places, and also for a municipal position that I was qualified for. When I earned that municipal position, my hard-work did not stop there. I continually tried to make improvements within my position, worked longer hours than my 9-5, and always brought work home with me. I was not the only municipal employee that was dedicated to their job, stressed to the max, and was always trying to do more with less. In fact, as my position required me to work in collaboration with a number of departments and offices, I got to experience first-hand the fact that the majority of lower level employees like myself were all struggling, working hard, with an ever growing work load. Sure – there are well paid people in management, and well paid employees that have been with the corporation for 20 + years. But not everyone is in that boat. Most employees bring home less than $40K a year. It was good for me a single person, certainly. Not great for all the single parents I worked with, that were supporting an entire family on that wage. They struggled just like everyone else in the private sector earning the same, paying back huge student loans, and supporting a family. As for sick days – I was on contract (there were a number of us on contract, and we don’t get sick days or benefits), but those that did qualify – that I knew personally – rarely used their sick days. In fact, one of my closest friends who has been working for the Municipality for 6 years, and has never taken a sick day. In fact, depending on your manager, you have to provide medical documentation to prove your illness in order to take those days. Or you may be the only one in your position that can cover your job – so when you are sick, you can’t go home, because no one else can cover the service you provide. A number of employees have hundreds of sick days saved up – that’s because they don’t use them! It is impossible to take 100 days off work for a paid vacation – it could not be done. So those days sit, unused, and employees still come in to work sick, still try to do more with less, and continually hope that their job will still be there for them after the next round of budget cuts each year.
This “rant” is to ask that people consider the other side of the coin. There are always two sides to every story. You may not always hear it in the comment section of online newspapers, but that doesn’t negate the fact.
Ex-Liberal
August 17, 2012 at 6:09 pm
Concerned… With all due respect, this ‘poor me, I deserve this cause I’m well educated and hardworking’ attitude does not move me in the slightest. As a matter of fact it is evedince to the fact that governement employees have become spoiled rotten.
The fact is, there are many, many hardworking well educated people available and willing to do the same job without these obscene benefits attached.
AND… If it’s impossible to use the accumalted sick days then why do they have them? The answer is.. BALOGNA! Are you kidding me? They can be used and they will be used. Either by way of time off or a payout. And who pays for it? The sucker tax payers.
This is a prime example of how top heavy, spend happ, wasteful governments take a financial toll on the public. This idea that there is an endless stream of revenue needs to end.
Why do you see/hear the anymosity? Because Joe Public is sick of it!
People can see the waste, the obsurd benefits and the redundancy. For every current CK employee who has the ‘appropriate education/skills’ for the job there is another 50 just as qualified that would be more than willing to take the job without the obsurd benfits attached.
The fact is, the revenue is not endless. These governements need to be smaller and take on a more business minded ‘trim the fat’ attitude.
Michael Cowtan
August 18, 2012 at 12:42 pm
I appreciate most of what you say, but unfortunately we have all seen what we consider to be waste with our own eyes. Come round to my house and I can show you an immediate example. A sidewalk repair which is laughable, and I am sure has only been done in case someone trips and falls and sues, and then the Muni can say they repaired it. In fact what they did was waste time and money because it is more dangerous now than it was. There is another hazard to trip over.
But it is not just the Municipality, it is every quasi government organisation. It is why municipalities get out of garbage pick up and road maintenance just as two example, because the private sector is not bound by union contracts that have been foisted on them by arbitrators who do not live in the real world, and whose only job is to pick a middle point between what unions are asking for and what management wants to pay.
Michael Cowtan
August 18, 2012 at 12:48 pm
I agree that the whole “sick pay” thing is a huge bone of contention, but on the other hand I can point you at people who work full time for the biggest retailer in the world who get 10 sick days a year, which do not accumulate, so they make sure they are “sick” 10 days a year. I suspect that they are not the only example.
Ex-Liberal
August 17, 2012 at 2:18 pm
With all the ‘thumbs down’ it would appear there are some CK employees reading these comments. It would be interesting to hear a rebuttal. How this type of lucrative agreement(s) between ‘employer’ and ‘employee’ is justified?
I suppose one argument would be the mindset of endless revenue that governments have. ‘Need more revenue?… that’s easy, just raise taxes.’
Try working in the real world. If private businesses operate with such lackadaisical spend thrift attitudes they go bankrupt…. and your job dissappears.
John Dershand - Muncipality Wages / Benefits - OUT OF CONTROL
August 17, 2012 at 7:21 pm
Clearly there are lots of municipal employees wanting to continue to not live in the real world where wage cuts and doing more with less is just the way based upon the votes down. I remember something called PUBLIC SERVANTS but now the PUBLIC IS SERVING THEM LARGE WAGES INCREASES AND BENEFITS that the private sector just does not see.
If you want PROOF check this link out and read more in this form.
http://inck.ca/groups/general-discussion-topics/forum/topic/2012-ck-municipal-budget-forum-2/?topic_page=3&num=15#post-165
Adrian
August 18, 2012 at 12:14 am
Don’t forget other “public” employees like police and fire. We all know the story of firefighters making big dollars, with another job on the side!
Ridgetown resident
August 18, 2012 at 2:26 am
How about municipal employees have an agreed number of sick days per year – and if they are not used, they vanish – they can not be saved up.
the thing that happens is they get saved up, then when the employee retires they have months of paid “sick leave” tacked on to the end of their time, in effect being paid full time while not working.