Funds Backed for Metrolink Day Care : Transportation: If approved by City Council, $250,000 would be provided to finish planning centers at Chatsworth and San Fernando stations.

It’s a typical morning--you’ve managed to get the kids breakfasted and dressed and you all pile into the car for another day traversing the vast geography of Southern California.

But instead of driving them to day care and yourself crazy crossing half the town on freeways to get to work, you just pop over to the local Metrolink station, leave the children at the day-care center there and head across the San Fernando Valley on the train.

It could happen.

On Wednesday, the Transportation Committee of the Los Angeles City Council approved the last piece of funding needed to begin work on constructing two day-care centers at Metrolink stations in Chatsworth and San Fernando to care for preschool-age children for fees between $72 and $135 a week.

The centers would be the first such facilities in Los Angeles County, and among only a handful nationwide, according to Cynthia Pansing, who is coordinating the project for the Los Angeles County Transportation Commission.

The city Transportation Committee’s action Wednesday, if approved by the full council next week, would provide $250,000 to address environmental concerns and finish planning the child-care centers. The centers would cost about $750,000 apiece, most of which the county hopes to cover with state transportation grants.

The idea, Pansing said, is to encourage parents to commute by train, and cut down on so-called “triangular trips,” in which parents drive their children to day care and then drive themselves to work.

According to a study conducted for the county Transportation Commission, if 75 children use the two centers, their parents--who would be required to take public transportation to work as a condition of using the day-care center--would drive 883,224 fewer commuting miles each year. They would use 29,441 fewer gallons of gasoline, saving $73,603 per year, or just under $1,000 per family, the study said.

“We want people to use public transportation,” said Councilman Hal Bernson, who serves on the city committee and represents the area around the Chatsworth station. “One of the things that would be an incentive would be for parents to be able to drop their kids off, take the train to work and then pick them up when they return in the evening.”

The centers would be run by private child-care providers, Bernson said. If construction begins this spring, they could be open as early as fall.

According to James Okazaki, the city’s transit chief, construction and development of the centers would be coordinated by the county Transportation Commission. If the effort is successful--and additional funds are available--similar facilities will be set up at other stations, he said.

Much of that money is coming from the state’s petroleum violation escrow account, set up to pay for demonstrations and tests of ways to encourage people to use public transportation, Okazaki said.

Karen Hill-Scott, who teaches planning at UCLA and is executive director of Crystal Stairs, a nonprofit child-care consulting agency in Los Angeles, said the centers will be effective only if the neighborhoods they serve really need them, and if prices and levels of care are appropriate.

“The concept of connecting child care to transit is a very sound one,” said Hill-Scott, who is conducting a review of the county Transportation Commission’s plans for the centers. “It just has to be done carefully.”

For instance, she said, some neighborhoods have few parents with young children, and others have parents who will not be able to afford private care.

Preliminary plans for the centers include fees ranging from $92 to $135 per week for infant care and $72 to $99 per week for preschool care. The actual prices will depend on the degree of care the county Transportation Commission decides it wants the centers to provide.

Those fees are higher than the average for child care in the neighborhoods surrounding both stations, according to a report prepared by Pansing and others for the county commission. In particular, parents in the area around Sylmar and San Fernando, which is served by the San Fernando station, tend to pay considerably less for child care, because many have low incomes and send their children to subsidized child-care facilities.

Still, the report suggested that commuters passing through Sylmar and San Fernando on their way to work might be willing to pay more than the average neighborhood rate in exchange for the convenience. Bernson said it is possible that the centers might be subsidized, allowing parents to pay for care on a sliding scale based on their incomes.

These are the types of issues, Hill-Scott said, that will need careful attention if the child-care centers are to be effective.

“We are short 130,000 to 150,000 spaces in child-care facilities countywide,” she said. “But not necessarily where there would be a Metrolink station. . . . Just because you plop a center down somewhere doesn’t mean everybody is going to use it.”