Council member Winkler responds on child care Council member Winkler responds on child care (June 23, 2004)

By Mickie Winkler

I want to respond to recent letters regarding child care in Menlo Park and to assure you that the same great programs now in place will continue. Below I wish to address some issues that I think are misunderstood. Measure T allotted only $1 million (not $7 million) to a childcare center. That later became $1.6 million. When we ran for City Council we had been told that the police station could not be renovated for child care. We subsequently discovered that the first floor not only could be used, but that it would be a great site. I have confidence, based on expert opinion, that the renovated facility will be excellent. And I have grave doubts, based on expert review, that the center as proposed was right. These are not ideas that fell out of the air, but have been considered and reconsidered and reweighted with new evidence over time.

I have also learned that we are the only nearby city that runs its own child-care program. They all offer excellent programs, mostly on land provided by the cities. Such a program exists at our own Los Lomitas School should you care to visit it. I have visited this and several others, in Redwood City and Palo Alto. While alternatives to a city-run program are not being considered in Menlo Park, please know that exemplary alternatives do exist and that Menlo Park will always have first-rate child-care programs. It's a community core value. Right now we have a total of about 165 children using the Menlo Park child-care program. This is a small number compared to the number of people who play soccer (over 1,000), use Burgess gym, use our library and so forth. However the Menlo Park School District polled the parents and found that many more parents would use after-school programs if those programs were on school sites rather than at Burgess. I hope that in the not too distant future, on-site programs at the schools will become part of the mix and the number of children served will increase.

People pay big-time to send their children to the city's child-care programs. That's a fact. But there is confusion about the term "cost recovery" as it relates to the Menlo Park MCC and Burgess after-school programs. Here is what I know about cost recovery:

Cost recovery does include teacher salaries and benefits, although it does not include the long-term cost of pensions. These are currently assessed at 6.4 percent of salary per year. The percent changes.

Cost recovery does include the driver's time for transporting the children to Burgess, the cost of buying the vans, the fuel, but not the maintenance. It does include some of the cost of senior staff in the Community Services department. It does not include city manager, personnel, city attorney or other non-community-service staff.

It does not include the cost of accounting or the maintenance cost of the child-care facilities. Bottom line, we as a community have said that we want to and will continue to keep Menlo Park a child-oriented community. Children are our most important product.

Mickie Winkler is mayor pro tem and a member of the Menlo Park City Council.

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