Utah lawmaker renews push for expanded child care access

Yahoo

21-02-2025

A bill from Senate Minority Leader Luz Escamilla, D-Salt Lake City, would identify obsolete state-owned buildings and state-owned property that could be turned into child care facilities. (Getty Images)
Utah, which has been dubbed a 'child care' desert for its shortage of care options, could soon provide retrofitted state facilities for expanded child care services in a new pilot program.
A bill from Senate Minority Leader Luz Escamilla, D-Salt Lake City, would create the Child Care Capacity Expansion Act. The Division of Facilities Construction and Management would be tasked with identifying obsolete state-owned buildings and state-owned property that could be turned into child care facilities.
With the newly retrofitted or constructed buildings, Utah would enter into a public-private partnership with child care operators.
'We're not in the business of child care centers and running them,' Escamilla said. 'It will be them (running the centers), but we will give them the lease, at no cost, so that will be the investment of the state.'
SB189 also stipulates that 40% of the capacity of a child care center would be reserved for children of state employees, National Guard members, military and low-income communities in the surrounding area. The bill passed the Senate in Wednesday and is waiting for introduction in the House.
A similar bill from Escamilla passed unanimously through the Senate during last year's session but failed to get House approval due to worries about practicality and a fiscal note of $5 million.
In a Senate debate Wednesday, Escamilla said she and others in the Women in the Economy Subcommittee under the Governor's Office of Economic Opportunity have been working on the bill for a year and a half and have conducted studies to determine strategies to alleviate the 'child care crisis.' In Utah, an estimated 75% of mothers with school-age children work, according to the study done by the Women in the Economy Subcommittee. The study also found that 74% of two-parent households with children under age 6 in Utah needed two incomes to cover household expenses.
'It's a very small number of facilities that we can use, and we're just trying to find many ways of being creative when it comes to helping with child care and our working families that are right now struggling with their finances,' Escamilla said.
Sen. Brady Brammer, R-Pleasant Grove, said while he does want child care options, there are already hundreds of privately owned and operated facilities in the state.
'I do have some concern with taking state-owned buildings that we otherwise may sell off assets that we no longer need or use for other purposes, and then retrofitting them so that we have a long-term obligation to keep a business in place at a subsidized rate, because we have now provided a facility, and we have provided the retrofitting cost for that facility to do what is otherwise a private endeavor,' he said. 'And I worry about this being an improper role of government.'
Escamilla said that with this 'small pilot program,' two concerns are being addressed: access to child care and cost containment.
'We have a problem with child care,' she said. 'What I was told very clearly in this legislature is that we will not do direct subsidies, that the state was not going to invest in direct subsidies, so we have to find creative solutions.'
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