L.A. Council Adopts ‘Child-Care Policy’ : Experts Call Move to Give Incentive to Businesses ‘Powerful, Realistic’

Addressing a child-care shortage in the city estimated at 265,000 spaces, the Los Angeles City Council has unanimously adopted an unusual citywide “child-care policy,” including a statement that vendors with child-care policies will be given preference in obtaining city contracts.

The council last week also voted to hire a child-care coordinator to create more day care services, a move undertaken by only a few dozen other cities throughout the country.

“The work force is changing and we need to meet its needs,” said Councilwoman Joy Picus, who for more than a year led the effort for the policy and new city position.

Under the policy, the city will also ease the permit process for construction of child-care facilities, cause the Planning Department to include “child-care objectives” in community plans and seek to make vacant city property available to child-care providers. The coordinator’s job is to implement the policy and assist city departments, developers and child-care providers in creating more care facilities.

The council’s call for preferential treatment of vendors with child-care policies who seek city contracts is unprecedented, said Sandra Burud, chairman of Summa Associates, a Los Angeles-based consulting company that helps businesses establish child-care programs throughout the country.

“No other city has done that in this country,” she said. “This could be the most realistic and powerful thing done to promote corporate child care.” The council document, however, is not specific about what such preference means or what vendors’ child-care policies should include.

A report to the council from the Personnel and Labor Relations Committee, which Picus chairs, noted there are 1.5 million children in the city, of which an estimated 400,000 need some form of child care.

The numbers are expected to rise dramatically, the report added, due to “an unusually large group of children born to the ‘baby boom’ generation” as well as “a high birth rate among recent immigrants to California.”

“This is a very important commitment on the part of the city to find a way to make child care available and affordable to every child that needs it,” said Vivian Weinstein, past chairwoman of the Mayor’s Advisory Committee on Child Care.

“It is a tremendous step forward--a starting point for the city,” said Susan Rose, director of the city Commission on the Status of Women.

Along with the child-care coordinator, the council also voted to create a Child Care Advisory Board, with five members appointed by the mayor and six by the council president.

The Los Angeles coordinator, whose salary has not yet been determined, will be hired within three to four months, according to a spokesman for the Personnel Department.

City involvement in child care, according to Amy Wilkins of the Children’s Defense Fund based in Washington, “is kind of a new thing, in the past two or three years,” coinciding with cutbacks in federal aid.

About 25 cities across the country, including Boston, Washington and Dallas, now have hired child-care coordinators, experts say. In California only a handful of municipalities have such positions, including Sacramento, Irvine and San Francisco.