The Sun
Sunnyvale's Newspaper

Photograph by Robert Scheer

Five-year-old Karissa Stewart, right, shows her friend Arrianna Hamiah, 4, one of her toys at Prodigy Daycare. The City Council is looking for ways to create more child care facilities, which are filled to capacity in Sunnyvale.

Council puts focus on child care

By Steve Enders

As Silicon Valley gets more crowded, so does everything else, including Sunnyvale's child-care centers.

The City Council is hoping to change that by making it a priority to provide more access to child care throughout the city.

Despite the objections of Councilman Stan Kawzcynski at last Tuesday's meeting, fellow councilmembers went ahead with plans to look into providing better care for children.

Kawzcynski's protest came in response to the issue of local businesses not doing enough to provide care for children of their employees.

"Employers are not giving their employees time to take care of their sick kids," he told the council. "For us to take time and money to fund this is just corporate welfare."

Child-care experts at the meeting said that businesses aren't usually willing to provide care because it's expensive, and then employees ask for other types of services, such as elder care.

The costs of the newly approved studies aren't clear at this time.

The process is just beginning to unfold, but in 1989 the council stated it was "concerned with the affordability, availability and quality of child care available to its residents and employees of its business community."

What this now means is finding sites and ways to get people to open more child-care facilities. The city's staff says this won't be an easy task.

Sunnyvale child-care centers are filled to 94 to 98 percent of capacity, depending on the age group. According to the report, a 90 percent rate would be closer to ideal.

What the city has committed itself to now is reviewing and updating the child-care site guidelines for industrial areas. It will also conduct a land-use analysis to identify potential sites or areas for locating child-care centers, particularly in employment-intensive industrial areas and downtown.

Since those are the places most people work, it makes sense to the city to locate child-care facilities nearby, the report said.

Until now, the city has somewhat looked away from placing child-care facilities in industrial areas, because of concern over toxic and other harmful chemicals that children could be exposed to.

According to the report, the ideal size of a child-care center would be on a lot of about 12,000 square feet, and plenty of lots that size are available in industrial areas.

The city still wouldn't locate child care next-door to a hazardous-waste storage facility. Instead, it will find sites that are distanced from those buildings and would perhaps rezone those areas where toxic materials would be limited, if even allowed at all.

Other sites are also seen as useful to the city. Existing school sites, city park buildings, fraternal organization buildings and religious facilities could all be used.

The problem, however, remains getting those sites to provide child care when it's not feasible to do so at all sites or the owners of the buildings simply don't want to. In many cases, there just isn't enough room for the children.

Currently, 49 child-care centers in Sunnyvale provide space for 4,830 children. Twenty-six of these programs are located at schools, 11 are operated in churches and only three are located in residential neighborhoods in converted homes.

Another drawback to opening private child-care centers is the often expensive environmental review process. The city is now proposing to pick up the tab, which could run in the $100,000 range, in order to guarantee the safety of children in facilities near industrial buildings.

Under the proposal, the city would conduct a blanket environmental impact review that would identify potentially good and bad sites.

Sunnyvale is also looking to other cities to get ideas on how to provide better care.

Notables include Palo Alto's requirement that whenever the city calls for environmental review of any development project, it must analyze the project's impact on child care in the city.

Also, San Francisco requires developers to pay into a fund to increase the amount of money available to provide affordable child care for the city's parents.

The work plan approved by the council Tuesday will now be turned over to the Department of Community Development for further review.

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This article appeared in the Sunnyvale Sun, December 24, 1997.
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