Group Plans Centers for Child Care : Employers Will Open 4 Downtown Sites to Aid Working Parents

A consortium of Los Angeles employers, wrestling with the shortage of child care, is negotiating for as many as four sites that would be converted to child-care centers for the benefit of parents working downtown.

The first of these centers will be at the corner of Olympic Boulevard and Flower Street and is expected to open in January.

Gretchen Anderson, a United Way official who serves as executive director of the consortium, said Monday that the group is also negotiating for one or two buildings in the west or southwest sectors of downtown Los Angeles and for a building at an undisclosed city-owned site near the Civic Center.

As planned, the Civic Center-area site would be a joint effort of the public and private sectors, with the city donating the building and the consortium--with private funds--

Owned by Parents

But perhaps the most intriguing experiment planned by the consortium will be at one of the centers planned for the west or southwest area of downtown Los Angeles: a cooperative owned by parents. Anderson said the plan is to have employers provide the money and develop the site and then turn over ownership to the parents.

The consortium, recently incorporated as a nonprofit group, expects to open one center per year until supply meets demand. The centers will be open to everybody, regardless of whether they are employed by companies that are consortium members or that help provide money for the centers.

“We realize there is no way that you could put this together on a ‘slots for dollars’ basis,” Anderson said. “There is too much need for that.”

United Way surveys have found that central Los Angeles child-care agencies receive an estimated 2,500 requests a year for only 650 child-care spaces. And a recent survey of just five major Los Angeles companies turned up 2,000 parents who said they would prefer and use child care near where they work.

Parents who enroll their children in these downtown centers will be charged for the service. Fee details have not been worked out, but Anderson said the charges will be in line with going rates, which are $60 to $75 a week for preschoolers and $75 to $85 a week for infants. Employers will, of course, have the option of subsidizing the cost.

Spearheading the consortium’s efforts to find solutions to the city’s child-care problems are the United Way and Allan Jonas, a Los Angeles businessman and real estate developer. Jonas is expected to be named president of the nonprofit organization.

Also among the organizers are First Interstate Bank, Security Pacific National Bank, Lockheed, Arco, Times Mirror, Transamerica Occidental Life Insurance and O’Melveny & Myers.

The group is expected to announce its name and its boards of directors and trustees soon. The trustees will be business executives, elected officials and philanthropists, and the directors will be chiefly child-care experts and corporate marketing and real estate development specialists.

Unusual Approach

The consortium, whose members have been meeting with elected Los Angeles officials for nine months, has settled on an unusual approach to child care. Unlike the companies that offer a single child-care center at the site of their operations, this employer consortium has decided that it can best ease the shortage by raising money for several centrally located centers.

“The more traditional model is businesses coming together and founding one site,” Anderson said. “We’re saying the best way to break up the logjam (of applications for child-care spots) downtown is to use corporate clout for brick and mortar and open as many centers as we can.”

To raise money, the group will kick off a fund-raising drive in September. Anderson said the group hopes to raise $2 million, mostly from Los Angeles employers.

He said the consortium also hopes to persuade the Deukmejian Administration to assist with the child-care needs of employees at the new state office building planned at 3rd and Spring streets.

The disclosure by the consortium comes on the heels of announcements by Union Bank, which plans an on-site care center at its new bank building in Monterey Park; by a group of Burbank employers, which has joined the public sector in offering child care to its employees and to the community at a former elementary school in Burbank, and by a San Francisco-area consortium of employers that plans to supply $400,000 to six state-funded resource and referral agencies.