What's at stake?
The City of Fresno has begun its yearlong journey to identify solutions to local childcare issues.
Solutions will be explored through a new childcare commission, initiated by Council Vice President Tyler Maxwell as part of a plan to lower costs and increase supply.
Fresno City Councilmember Tyler Maxwell and a host of industry experts formally began a yearlong mission to propose solutions for the city to help increase the access and supply of affordable local childcare.
Wednesday’s inaugural meeting of the city’s Commission on Family Affordability and Childcare Access was held this week at City Hall, officially introducing an 11-person panel of city leaders and experts who will spend the next 12 months identifying ways to make childcare more accessible and affordable.
The commission is part of a plan Maxwell introduced in June ahead of the city’s budget hearings. He secured a one-time city contribution of $2 million toward a one-year pilot program between the City of Fresno and First Five of California aimed at addressing local childcare issues.
Those issues, Maxwell said on Wednesday, have forced parents to call off of work, older students missing school to care for younger children to skip school, and families to lose out on income as eligible workers forgo jobs to look after their little ones.
“Childcare is not simply a family issue,” Maxwell said. “It is also an economic workforce and community issue as well.”
Fresno Mayor Jerry Dyer said the exacerbation of local childcare problems, on top of the increasing cost of living, has made his administration more receptive to Maxwell’s proposal. At Wednesday’s commission meeting, Dyer said that the city typically doesn’t contribute to programs like these, choosing to instead focus on bettering the lives of local residents through investments in public safety, road infrastructure and public safety.
“But we understand the pain that people are going through in our community today in terms of the affordability crisis,” Dyer said.
The median cost of childcare in Fresno County ranged between $11,000 and $24,000, according to data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. In a report published last year, the Public Policy Institute of California found that for many families, even low costs for childcare can take up a huge sum of their monthly income.
Maxwell also noted that Fresno has been identified as a childcare desert, meaning that the city does not have enough childcare resources available for its constituency of children.
The commission is expected to report to the city council before the one-year mark with a presentation on their initial findings. The report was initially expected to come in January, but Maxwell said the later-than-expected start for the commission means that report might not come until about six months from now.
Wednesday’s introductory meeting did not lead to any concrete declarations on what the commission’s proposed service plans or funding solutions could be.
Maxwell said he believed Measure C in Alameda County — a 20-year half-cent sales tax that generates about $150 million annually in funding to expand access to early childhood education in the eastern Bay Area —is a “golden model” for what long-term financing could look like.
However, he added that it’s too early to commit to anything in terms of a solution and long-term funding, as the commissioners are only just beginning their 12-month-long journey to identify childcare solutions in the city.
The city’s attempt to find financing for childcare comes months after President Donald Trump’s administration attempted to freeze about $10 billion in federal childcare funding for five Democrat-led states, including California, following unsubstantiated claims of welfare fraud. The courts have ruled on multiple occasions that the federal government cannot carry out the freeze for now, but the case is ongoing.
