Conferees Want Project Planning to Include Child Care

Roads, sewers, air quality, even schools--city and county governments usually talk about those issues before approving tracts of new homes and business parks. But child care rarely gets a mention.

That needs to change if Ventura County is to meet future demand for high-quality, licensed supervision, participants in the county’s first-ever child care “economic summit” said Friday.

“We have to make child care part of the checklist,” said Lauri Flack, a Ventura planning commissioner and moderator of the event, attended by 120 people at the Cal State Channel Islands campus in Camarillo.

The conference, put on by the county’s Child Care Planning Network, an advocacy group that shares information and resources, brought together child-care specialists, county social service administrators and operators of child-care businesses. Keynote speaker Susan K. Lacey, chairwoman of the county Board of Supervisors, talked of the need for collaboration among government, schools and private employers to build a child-care network.

She drew applause when she alluded to the two decades she and others have spent working to make child care a priority for Ventura County policy-makers.

“Isn’t it wonderful to be here for an economic summit that is about kids?” Lacey said. “Who would have thought we would get this far.”

Organizers had hoped to draw elected leaders and planning officials from each of the county’s 10 cities. But just three cities were represented: Ventura, Thousand Oaks and Port Hueneme.

Only a handful of private employers showed up. And there were even fewer participants from the county’s 20 school districts, even though schools are looked at as a logical place to expand child-care programs.

Port Hueneme Councilman Jon Sharkey said he was disappointed that so few municipal leaders showed interest.

“People don’t think of child care in economic or public-policy terms,” Sharkey said. “But this is a real business that generates real income.”

And that, several speakers said, was the point of the summit. Child care is a $142-million county industry that helps drive the local economy by freeing up parents for work.

A report released in March by the National Economic Development & Law Center shows that employment in Ventura County is expected to increase by nearly 50% in the next 20 years, adding 178,900 jobs.

While current child-care supply meets demand--local centers and home-based providers have the capacity to care for nearly 30,000 children--a shortage will develop unless barriers to growth are addressed, the report says.

Among them are the industry’s chronic problems: a shortage of qualified workers, meager pay and benefits and an inability to get financing for construction and expansion. Perhaps the biggest problem, summit participants said, is that child care is not viewed as a public-policy issue but as a problem to be solved by parents.

Supervisor Kathy Long said she will propose that child care be an element of environmental studies conducted before local governments approve building projects.

Cities also might consider including child care as part of their general plans, which map out growth, said Tom Berg of the county’s Resource Management Agency.

“Right now, it’s not even on the table,” said Berg, who moderated a work group that discussed how cities and the county can better provide for child care.

Lacey suggested that the county may be able to use Proposition 10 dollars to provide incentives for private employers. The county will receive $11 million a year from the measure, approved by voters last year to pay for early childhood education programs.

Advocates also need to convince employers that worker productivity and profits will rise if their employees’ child-care needs are met, Lacey and others said.