Citing City’s Rent, Oxnard Day-Care Center May Close

A nonprofit child-care center in south Oxnard will be forced to close its doors because its operators can no longer afford the $5,000 monthly rent for the city-owned facility, the center’s operators said Wednesday.

But parents, who were notified this week that the New Beginnings Day Care Center will close in 30 days, vowed to fight to keep it open.

Some parents said they will not be able to find other permanent day care for their children, particularly infants, at a comparable cost in south Oxnard.

“This is a pretty basic amenity to a community,” said parent Marla Petal, 36, who said she must now search for other care for her 21-month-old daughter Daniya. “It’s really not acceptable that a center in a publicly funded place be closed down like this.”

The day-care center, in a 5,000-square-foot space in the South Oxnard Center on Bard Road, was started in September, 1990, under the sponsorship of the New Beginnings Christian Center, said the Rev. Lonnie McCowan, the Oxnard church’s pastor.

Jack Lavin, the city’s community facilities manager, said the center’s $5,000 rent includes utilities, maintenance and custodial service.

The space was designed for the operation of a child-care center when the center was built, he said.

Oxnard commercial broker John Waters called the rent a fair market rate for south Oxnard, considering that the building is relatively new and that utilities and maintenance are included.

The center has an 89-student capacity, but only 70 students are enrolled, center director Latricia Gavin said.

In addition to children from middle-income families, the center enrolls students from low-income families and abused and foster children whose fees are subsidized by social service agencies.

“But even if enrollment was up, we wouldn’t break even because of the high overhead,” McCowan said.

The church has been spending $3,000 to $5,000 a month to subsidize the center, but can no longer afford to keep doing so, McCowan said. To keep the center open, the rent must be cut in half, he said.

But Lavin said the city can’t reduce the rent by $2,500 a month.

“The city can’t subsidize a private operation,” Lavin said. “We can’t afford to subsidize anything at this point. . . . We could make some reduction, but nowhere near what they want.”

New Beginnings is in the 2-year-old South Oxnard Center, which the financially beleaguered city is trying to turn over to private or nonprofit groups.

The rent of about $1 per square foot that city officials charge the New Beginnings operators is comparable to rent the city charges for another day-care facility, La Escuelita in La Colonia, Lavin said.

La Escuelita pays about $3,300 for a 3,454-square-foot space, and provides its own kitchen maintenance, he said.

Another La Colonia child-care facility in a city-owned building, Green Valley Child Care, is charged signficantly less than the $1 a foot, but operates from a Quonset hut and pays its own utilities and maintenance, Lavin said.

New Beginnings officials said they have found other day-care centers that will accept many of their students for the remainder of the school year at the same rates.

But officials have been unable to find a south Oxnard center that provides infant care for the $105 a week that New Beginnings parents are charged. “We’re desperately trying to find options for the infants,” McCowan said.

Some parents also said that moving their children to another facility will shatter the bonds that they have formed with New Beginnings teachers and students.

“We already agreed at a parent meeting that we would pay a higher rate to keep it open,” said Terray West, president of the center’s parent association.

Even lower-income parents agreed to pay $10 to $25 more a week until a solution can be worked out, she said. Meanwhile, parents are planning to bring their children to a City Council meeting on Feb. 4 to plead that the rent be lowered, West said.

“People who can’t find child care find their jobs at risk,” Petal said. “If you don’t have the basic services for working families, the area is going to get more economically depressed.”