NJ small town manager built up $813k in comp time and answered to no one

There is a number sitting on the books in Ringwood, New Jersey that stopped a room full of residents cold earlier this month.

$813,240.07.

That is what the borough could owe its town manager, Scott Heck, in accumulated comp time when he eventually retires. When residents packed the council chamber to find out how it got that big, nobody left feeling better about it.

The short version is this. Heck has worked for Ringwood for nearly 30 years in one role or another. Council member, deputy mayor, mayor, director of public works, superintendent of water and sewer, and eventually borough manager. Small towns run lean. One person wears a lot of hats, works a lot of hours, and tracks them for payroll as required. According to NJ.com, a consultant recently added it all up: nearly 6,200 hours of accumulated comp time valued at $813,240.07.

The detail that hit hardest in that council chamber was not the number itself. It was the fact that as borough manager, Heck signed off on his own timesheets. Multiple mayors from both parties apparently knew the hours were building over the years. A consultant reviewed the records back to 2008 and called it legal. The borough attorney agreed.

Legal and right are not always the same thing.

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How $813,000 quietly piles up

Most people sitting in that room have worked jobs where the rules at the top looked nothing like the rules on the floor. You clocked out. You did not accumulate. If you stayed late, that was just called Tuesday. The idea that someone could quietly bank nearly 6,200 hours over a career -- enough to cash out at $813,000 -- while the people around them lived by a completely different set of expectations is not unique to Ringwood. It is just how the system was built.

And the system is starting to catch up with itself. Companies and municipalities across the country are finally trimming management layers they should have looked at years ago. Here in New Jersey, nearly 4,000 jobs have already disappeared in 2026. The front line always feels those cuts first. The people at the top tend to land differently.

In Ringwood, the landing could cost $813,000.

The offer on the table

To his credit, Heck says he does not want the money. He is offering to walk away from the full payout in exchange for lifetime health benefits for himself and his spouse -- a Medicare supplement, since he will be 65 when he retires. A consultant put that cost at roughly $324,000, saving taxpayers nearly $489,000.

That is a real saving. But for a lot of residents in that room the savings was almost beside the point. The question they kept coming back to was how a decade of quiet accumulation turned into an $813,000 line item that nobody dealt with until a consultant finally put it on a screen. Heck said he had been raising it with the Finance Committee for about ten years. The answer, apparently, was always later.

Later just showed up.

The mayor tabled the proposed contract at the end of the meeting. The council takes it up again April 21. Between now and then, Ringwood is sitting with something a lot of New Jersey towns will recognize. The bill for decisions nobody wanted to make always arrives eventually. And it never seems to come at a good time.