Kitchener may be headed for bankruptcy

Some Ontario cities, including Kitchener, may be headed for bankruptcy.

That is according to the group Fair Pensions for All.

FPA President Bill Tufts tells 570’s Gary Doyle if cities don’t change the way they’re doing business, there are going to be serious repercussions down the road.

Tufts says the City of Kitchener paid out over $177,000 last year to its top 3 employees who were no longer employed by the city in unused sick time.

He points to one specific example where one city worker received $75,000 for sick time payout, “Because he hadn’t been sick, he turned to you and me as tax payers and said, ‘I deserve to get paid for those sick days that I didn’t take.’ So we turn around and wrote that employee a check for $75,000 as a bonus for sick time they didn’t take.”

Tufts, says the city workers are also getting lump sum payments for unused sick days and vacation time, “And probably one of the biggest ones is free health care after retirement. These are all things that are special privileges in the public sector, none of these are paid out in the private sector.”

And with that Tufts says the solution is pretty simple if cities want to avoid going bankrupt, “We see the solution as privatization. Privatization of golf courses, hockey rinks, libraries, community centres, along with services such as garbage collection. We think one of the solutions is, if it’s in the yellow pages, let’s privatize it.”