Although regulations for child care centers were presumably designed with the best intentions – the safety of children – professionals in the world of child care say they are often tedious and unreasonably prohibitive.
U.S. Sen. Michael Bennet met with employers, local government officials and early child care professionals at the Durango Chamber of Commerce on Friday to check the pulse on efforts to address the child care gap, a crisis defined by the number of children who need care versus how many spaces are accessible in child care programs.
Child care providers and members of the Early Childhood Council of La Plata County discussed an Early Childcare Strategic Investment Plan, formed in coordination with the La Plata Economic Development Alliance.
The investment plan is a five-year strategy to raise $20 million through public investments and community buy-in with the goals of raising child care providers’ wages and helping providers acquire and renovate suitable child care facilities.
As of January, there were 650 infants in La Plata County in need of child care and only 80 slots across child care providers, leaving the child care gap 500 slots.
Heather Hawk, executive director of the Early Childhood Council, said The Growing Place owner Amy Eckhart is a strong case study of the sorts of challenges early child care providers face.
Eckhart was uprooted from her rented child care space at the Durango Health and Rehabilitation Center (formerly the Junction Creek Health & Rehabilitation Center in Durango) after operating there for 13 years when the building was purchased by capital investment firm The Ensign Group.
She eventually found a new space in a home on the property of the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Durango. But getting there wasn’t so simple.
Her clients had to seek new child care providers, some struggling to find ones quickly, and needed to find a space The Growing Place could legally occupy and operate in.
“Finding a new space in this community is not easy,” Hawk said. “The infrastructure that we need is institutional, and so it needs to meet fire code, it has to meet licensing, it has to meet International Building Code.”
It took nearly a year for Eckhart to move from one space to another, she said. Rental commercial spaces were unaffordable.
Katy Howell, deputy director and co-founder of Explorers Early Childhood Education, Inc. said Explorers’ current space is large enough to hold 23 students, but because it is considered a “residential building,” Explorers is only permitted to have up to 12 students.
Stacy Zimmerman Ferrell, Explorers executive director and co-founder, said because that particular location was a startup, Explorers decided it would be too cost prohibitive to rezone it as a commercial space, which would allow it to have up to 23 students.
Bennet asked how navigating regulations and red tape could be made easier.
Kip Koso, a Durango City Councilor, said providers are bumping from bureaucratic body to bureaucratic body – the city, the fire district and the state.
Hawk said regulations are multilayered. The Early Childhood Council needs to audit the city’s regulations that are impacting child care expansion. Providers face fees for having fire inspections to ensure they meet fire code. The list goes on.
“We have inherited a system, I think, where people quite rightly are saying, ‘No risk tolerance, no risk tolerance, no risk tolerance,’” Bennet said. “We're all being forced to ask the question, ‘Does that balance make sense?”
Hawk said the amount of red tape does not make sense.
When Colorado created the Department of Early Childhood in 2022, regulations stacked even higher, she said.
A provider wanting to offer universal preschool, for example, is required to have a “vendor agreement” with the state. She said it’s the same kind of agreement with insurance requirements a construction company contracted by the Colorado Department of Transportation might be required to have.
“Everybody has to meet it. So if you run a child care center from home, and you have six kids, you have to carry a million dollars in liability, $3 million in malpractice, and that is unsustainable,” she said.
As a result, the state has 3,600 individual agreements with as many providers. That’s 3,600 agreements that must be renewed annually and often get hung up in process.
“It’s a bureaucratic nightmare,” Hawk said.
“We had millions of dollars less money than ... promised in the agreement for no apparent reason other than the bureaucracy had stalled somewhere, and the paperwork hadn’t been done properly,” she said.
Bennet also toured the Residences at Durango on Friday, where he, city councilors and developers discussed the affordable workforce housing project and the hiccups along the way, including difficulty finding a water main that was not located where old planning maps said it would be.
cburney@durangoherald.com
