EDITORIAL: Give child-care issue one last airing EDITORIAL: Give child-care issue one last airing (March 09, 2005)

The troubling disclosure that the City of Menlo Park failed to adequately notice meetings of a child-care task force last year has rekindled an old dispute between the current City Council majority and a group of parents who want the city to build a new $6 million child care center from scratch, rather than squeeze it into the old police station.

The child care center controversy began when Lee Duboc and Mickie Winkler joined Nicholas Jellins on the council after the 2002 election. Facing a budget crisis, the Duboc-Winkler-Jellins triumvirate won a 3-2 vote to look at other, less costly, child-care options, and eventually received a bid of less than $3 million to turn the old police station into a child care center.

But in the process, a task force chosen in 2003 to study child-care options held meetings that were not officially noticed, a violation of the state's open meeting law. City Attorney Bill McClure admitted the oversight last week, but said that any protest about the lack of disclosure had to be filed within 90 days of the last meeting, a deadline that has long since passed.

Mr. McClure said the council now has three options:

** Simply award the bid, since there is no legal way to stop the process without a majority council vote;

** Hold one last task force meeting to "cure" the notice problem, and then vote on whether to award the contract. If acted on quickly, this option could still leave time to award the bid before the March 25 deadline expires.

** Form another task force and make sure that all meetings are noticed properly. By doing so, the city would lose the current low bid and would have to put the project out to bid again, a move that almost certainly would add substantial costs.

Despite the serious oversight of not providing notice of the task force meetings, now is not the time for the city to commit additional resources to this project. With the city's costs continuing to outpace revenues, to do anything other than award the bid to remodel the old police station by March 25 strikes us as fiscally irresponsible.

Any move to reopen the bidding process would almost certainly and add thousands of dollars to the cost. And in the unlikely event that the council decided to put the earlier "design from scratch" option out to bid, its cost would certainly be far more than the estimated $6 million, due to the rapidly escalating costs of building materials.

The best course for the council now is to accept Mr. McClure's second option -- to reconvene the task force and hold one more, properly noticed, public hearing, and then award the bid, unless substantial new testimony changes the minds of the council majority. That way, opponents will get a chance to state their case before the task force, and the council will have the benefit of hearing other points of view, even if the majority's mind is already made up.

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