Creating Day-Care Facilities Is Not Child’s Play

In a section of the city starved for child care, David Poole thought he had a solution. Why not put child-care centers in portable buildings on elementary school parking lots, right next to the temporary classrooms sprouting from the asphalt at overcrowded schools citywide?

The Pardee Construction Co. executive won approval to place child-care centers on the campuses of eight Mira Mesa elementary schools, to provide before- and after-school care for 560 “latchkey children” just 50 feet from their classrooms.

Harmonium Inc., a nonprofit social service agency, would operate the centers. Five large development companies kicked in most of the money for the $19,000 facilities. Poole raised the rest by holding a roast of the district’s councilman, Ed Struiksma.

Then the Trouble Began

Then Poole ran into the city bureaucracy.

Since the child-care centers were commercial enterprises, an $8,000 fee for each facility would have to be paid to the city to help build roads, parks and other public facilities, Poole was told. In addition, each center would have to pay school fees of $1.50 per square foot.

Worst of all was the city building code requirement that each child-care center be placed on a concrete foundation, even though the facilities would sit just yards from the foundation-less classrooms, which fell under state building codes.

“If we had to deal with everything that came along, it would have cost us $80,000 a site,” Poole said Thursday.

Poole’s problems are an all too common example of the bureaucratic obstacles that stifle development of child-care centers in San Diego, a city that lags behind other urban centers in development of the badly needed resource, child-care experts and city officials say.

The creation of child-care centers, which already face difficulty gaining financing, is further undercut by a torturous permit process, poorly defined zoning regulations and a lack of expertise about the facilities in the city departments that are responsible for their approval, according to the members of a new task force studying the problem.

“You’re bouncing around and one person says you need this and another person says you need this, and they only know their own rules,” said Lynne Heidel, a land-use attorney who studied the city’s child-care approval process for the task force. “What needs to happen . . . is in each department, you need a person who knows about day care.”

Task Force Preparing Report

The task force, composed of child-care advocates, building industry representatives, school system officials and others, was quietly formed by Councilmen Ron Roberts and Wes Pratt several months ago. It is preparing recommendations to the council’s Public Safety and Services Committee on how to promote development of child-care services in the city.

The council will vote shortly on a proposal to hire the city’s first child-care coordinator, an initiative advanced this year by Mayor Maureen O’Connor’s call for creation of the new post and her declaration of 1989 as the “Year of the Child.”

“We kind of want to jump-start the coordinator” by supplying a list of recommendations as soon as that official takes office, Roberts said.

High on the task force list is the promotion of child care on school sites, probably by private, nonprofit agencies such as the YWCA, Roberts said Thursday. In May, 1988, the San Diego Unified School District approved a policy allowing such ventures.

(The school system operates 27 “children’s centers” for 2,200 low-income preschool and school-age children, under a program begun in 1942 by the federal government when World War II forced large numbers of women into the work force. Another 875 4- and 5-year-olds attend state-funded preschools in 22 other locations.)

Nonprofit child-care centers might be added to two elementary schools, Lowell and Washington, when they are remodeled utilizing the recently approved statewide Proposition Y building improvement funds, and Central Elementary School might receive a similar addition, Davis said.

Other task force proposals include encouraging private employers to offer flexible benefits, which a parent could choose to spend on child care, a plan that city government workers currently enjoy.

‘Have to Get Off the Dime’

“We have to make it work,” said Kay Davis, a school district trustee and member of the child-care task force. “If we have to change some regulations districtwide, that has to be done. If the city has to change its regulations, that has to be done. If we have to lobby together in Sacramento, that has to be done. We just have to get off the dime and make it work.”

After laboring in obscurity for years, child-care advocates were encouraged in January when O’Connor made her declaration and highlighted the need for child care. Later that month, the city applied but did not receive a $25,000 state grant to fund a child-care master plan.

The Childcare Resource Service estimates that licensed day-care facilities in the county can handle 50,768 children, while another 92,238 youngsters go without service. Of those, an estimated 48,000 to 63,000 are latchkey children who spend their afternoons unsupervised or alone because their parents work and cannot arrange or afford child care.

It will be no small task to streamline the city’s child-care permit process, Heidel said. Zoning requirements are unclear, and applicants frequently need a specialized conditional-use permit to operate in commercial or industrial areas.

There is no clearly established ratio of parking spaces for day-care centers, she said. Fire codes limit where day-care centers can be placed in high-rise offices. Evacuation plans must be filed. Bathrooms for the handicapped are required, even if the applicant has no state license to accept handicapped children.

Meanwhile, the school district policy that would allow child-care centers on campuses requires yearly permits, raising the possibility that the child-care center could be removed if the school needs the space for extra classrooms. That provision will make lenders very hesitant to finance child-care facilities, which already have difficulty turning a profit, Poole said.

“What I’d like to see done is to have a checklist of some sort, that somebody who wants to do a day-care center can get at one place in the city,” Heidel said.

The council also must make a decision on whether it wants to waive certain fees for child-care centers.

Different Issues at Stake

“There’s a social issue and a policy issue here, and that’s whether you want to provide that incentive to that person who wants to provide day care,” she said. “It’s not that great a loss to the city, but it means an awful lot to the provider,”

Roberts, however, was reluctant to offer support for that idea. “There are fees that are supposed to be absorbed uniformly,” he said.

Poole said that, with Struiksma and school board member Jim Roache running interference, he was able to have his child-care centers categorized so that the fees could be waived.

His problem with the cement foundations, however, is still unresolved. Representatives of the city, the school district and the developer will meet today in an effort to work it out.

If they determine that the child-care centers fall under the city’s building code, the foundations must be built, said Richard Christopherson, assistant director of the building inspection department.

Poole, who said he was accustomed to “being beat up” in his quest for permits for residential developments, expected to “find a planning and engineering and building inspection department willing to help me. I got beat up just as bad.

“I thought I was being picked on because I was a developer,” he said. “Uh-uh. They do this to everybody.”