COVID-era federal stopgaps for what Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen has called a “broken” child care market are coming to an end. Without clear action from federal and state governments, local governments are debating what to do.
Summit County Council Chair Roger Armstrong said businesses should do more before the county steps in.
The council heard from Economic Development Director Jeff Jones and Early Childhood Alliance Coordinator Kristen Schulz about the county’s child care deficit.
The conversation came a week after the Park City Council put $1 million of its next budget toward child care and formed a work group to decide how to allocate it.
“I can't treat public monies that way,” Armstrong said. “And if I did, I would have a real problem with members of the public that expect us to be responsible for the way that we spend money.”
He said he was in a similar place with affordable housing.
“We have to do a lift, and the lift is not going to come with a single government entity taking it on,” the council chair said. “It's going to have to be countywide, with our business community stepping up and saying, ‘Okay, let's do this together.’”
Councilmembers Chris Robinson, Tonja Hanson and Malena Stevens didn’t mention the business community but did have concerns about funding something without seeing a plan for how to allocate the money first.
Vice Chair Stevens also voiced an additional concern, saying a one-time grant or other investment may contribute to instability down the road.
“I also don't want to just postpone an inevitable cliff that then happens in 2025 or 2026,” she said.
Ideally, Stevens said, there would be an ongoing funding source.
Wednesday’s meeting was just a work session; no funding measure was up for approval.
Schulz used the presentation to explain the importance of early childhood care to support brain development.
The gold standard, she said, are Nordic countries. Those governments allocate taxpayer dollars to children at birth rather than at five years old, as the U.S. does with the public school system.
Schulz said the U.S. invests the least of any developed nation in the world in early childhood care, except for Cyprus and Turkey. And within the U.S., Utah does even less.
“So I feel like our Summit County kids are really some of the least invested in the world,” she said, “in terms of the system that is there to say for their care and education.”
It doesn’t seem likely that Summit County will put $1 million toward childcare in the same way Park City did right now.
Robinson and Stevens suggested having a working group convene to explore solutions before the next budget is finalized in December.
