GSA Seeks Space for Federal Child-Care Center in Downtown

The U.S. General Services Administration, attempting to improve employee productivity and reduce child-related absences, is seeking space in downtown Los Angeles to house the first day-care center in the county for children of federal employees.

“The federal community is very much like the private sector,” said Mary Filipini, regional GSA spokeswoman, “and we have to address the issue of providing care” for preschool children of GSA workers.

She said the GSA, the federal government’s landlord, has no space of its own and thus wants to lease between 4,750 and 5,250 square feet of space together with 15 reserved, off-street parking spaces in the downtown business district. The facility will have a capacity of about 100 children, she said.

‘Feeling Out the Market’

“We’re feeling out the market and sampling what’s out there,” Filipini said.

The GSA’s role here will be limited to finding a site for the day-care center and paying for the space, Filipini said. Once the space is available, she said, interested parents will have to work together to find someone to run the facility.

The effort to expand child care for federal workers is part of “A New Agenda,” a 1986 GSA initiative designed to improve the quality of the government workplace.

As in private industry, the government loses workdays to employees who call in sick due to child-care problems, said Barbara Leonard, the Washington-based director of the GSA’s child-care program. With more children being born to two-income families, she said, child care for many is no longer an option but a necessity.

By September, the GSA plans to open an additional 25 centers in cities where there are high concentrations of federal employees. Each center will provide care for about 100 children. Although 25 is an “ambitious” number, child care has become a GSA “priority,” Leonard said.

“We have to be competitive with the private sector in order to attract employees and keep the ones we have at work,” Leonard said.

Currently, the 13 federal child-care centers are in Boston (the first to open in 1977); Detroit; Ft. Schnelling, Minn.; Andover, Mass.; Philadelphia; Battle Creek, Mich.; and seven in Washington.

The first federal child-care facility in California opened about a year ago in Menlo Park in Northern California. Another is expected to open in June in Orange County.

The Los Angeles facility is expected to provide care for children of federal employees in the courthouse area, said Vilma Milmoe, the executive director of the Los Angeles Federal Executive Board, an association of federal government executives.

GSA officials surveyed 6,610 federal government employees to gauge interest in the child-care center, Milmoe said. Only 617 employees, less than 10% of the work force, expressed interest in a child-care center close to work.

Backed by Working Mother

Among those who favor the idea is Sherry Rollman, an eight-year federal employee, a resident of West Covina and mother of a 6-year-old son. Her workplace is 22 miles from her son’s child-care facility, and her husband works 38 miles from it.

“I think it would be wonderful to have a center right here,” Rollman said Wednesday. “If he was in the area, I could visit him, and I would feel more secure.

“When you’re at work and hear your child is sick, you panic. You lose your train of thought and worry.”

The GSA’s plans were also applauded by Karen Hill-Scott, co-founder of a private, nonprofit child development agency in Inglewood called Crystal Stairs. But Hill-Scott noted that in Los Angeles the child care “shortfall is so large that one or two centers are not going to make a substantial difference for the entire county population.”

Hill-Scott said a soon-to-be-released report by her agency estimates that there are 58,315 children under 2 years old who need licensed child care, but there are only 13,000 licensed child-care spaces available in the city.

There are only 97,000 spaces for approximately 123,000 children aged 2-5 who need day care, Hill-Scott said.

Hill-Scott described the disparities found in a survey conducted in late 1985 as “conservative.”

At present, there are four child-care facilities in the business and federal area of downtown Los Angeles, Hill-Scott said.