This story has been updated to correct a photo caption name reference.
Four Juneau residents, including two acting state department commissioners and the deputy city manager, are among 13 people named last week to a Child Care Task Force that was greeted with some skepticism when it was announced by Gov. Mike Dunleavy earlier this year.
The local members, however, cite progress the city is making with problems such as a shortage of workers due largely to inadequate pay, and say their experiences can help contribute to the recommendations the task force is scheduled to deliver by July 31, 2024.
The City and Borough of Juneau Assembly, for instance, has been implementing recommendations from its own task force from a few years ago, which includes assistance such as grants to providers, said Deputy City Manager Robert Barr, one of the appointees to the state committee. He noted such efforts started at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, which has limited the data to evaluate the impacts and thus further examination will be beneficial.
“Having had these programs in place since 2020, were it not for the pandemic, we would hopefully be able to demonstrate their impacts,” he said. “All I can really say is that our child care situation, while still not where it needs to be, at least we didn’t see the sort of reduction in spaces that we commonly heard about in other communities. So I think that can be attributed to the work that we’ve been doing. But we still have a lot of progress to make.”
Barr is also a board member of thread, a non-profit child care resource and referral network. He said he applied to be on the governor’s task force because of the magnitude of the statewide struggles in providing “an adequately funded, adequately staffed child care system.”
“It’s a really challenging business model to make work,” he said, adding “it seems like this would be a good place to hopefully make a difference on addressing some of those broader challenges that our providers are facing.”
Another local resident of the task force is Matthew Bitinas, operations specialist for the U.S. Coast Guard Sector Juneau, who moved here seven years ago. He’s a parent of two young children and a volunteer board member of the Gold Creek Child Development Center. He said that while the center helps provide some availability of local care, he applied for the task force due to the broader overall need he hears about from others.
“Some of the main components are increasing availability while maintaining affordability and quality of child care,” he said.. “Anything we can do to hit those targets.”
Child care was cited as one of the two biggest problems — housing being the other — in recruiting and retaining employees in Southeast Alaska, according to an annual economic survey published recently. The web-based survey conducted in April received 370 responses from regional business leaders representing nearly 10,000 employees, and slightly more than 50% of respondents stated the lack of child care and housing were significant problems.
“It’s just an industry that’s not able to pay the same rate as servers at restaurants,” said Meilani Schijvens, owner and director of Rain Coast Data, during a presentation last week to the Sitka Chamber of Commerce about the survey she conducted. “We’re really asking child care providers to take these lower rates and sort of subsidize the overall economy. The only solution is if there is public spending to help support the child care sector, or private industry spending to help support the child care sector.”
The Alaska State Legislature this year approved $7.5 million intended to supplement wages of child care providers, raising them from the current average of about $14.50 an hour by a few dollars. But that was half of the originally proposed $15 million, which would have boosted wages to about $20 an hour, and the reduced funding is still subject to a line-item veto by Dunleavy when he signs the budget for the fiscal year that starts July 1.
Dunleavy, when asked during the announcement of his task force about his willingness to support the $15 million in wage supplements as well as other existing legislation intended to boost child care, said “I think knee-jerk reactions without a deep dive would be a mistake.”
That led to criticism that the task force is essentially kicking the can down the road since it is scheduled to issue a preliminary report this December and a final report with recommendations next July — which means the Legislature almost certainly won’t be able to consider those recommendations until they convene in January of 2025.
Bitinas said he disagrees with those suggesting the task force’s year-long task is stalling potential remedies now.
“I would definitely say this is a step in the right direction,” he said. “Before anything is implemented I think a well thought-out plan is needed and I think this will contribute to that.”
In addition to Barr and Bitinas, the other two Juneau residents on the task force are acting commissioners of state departments appointed by Dunleavy.
One is Heidi Teshner, acting commissioner of the Department of Education and Early Development. She emphasized the need for the task force from the perspective of those seeking child care.
“Parents need high-quality child care, provided in a safe environment,” Teshner said when the task force was announced. “We understand that parents are empowered to give their best efforts at work when they can do so with confidence, knowing their children are being cared for in a safe and healthy environment.”
The other Juneau resident is Cathy Muñoz, acting commissioner of the Alaska Department of Labor and Workforce Development. In a letter in the current issue of Alaska Economic Trends, a monthly publication by the department, she noted Dunleavy’s budget for the coming year includes a pilot project for an employer-sponsored child care development center at the Mat-Su Regional Medical Center.
”Alaska is leading the nation with this new partnership with the Mat-Su Regional Medical Center and Alaska’s Business Enterprise Program (BEP) to create an employer-sponsored child care development center in the hospital,” she wrote. “This center will help hospital staff address the high demand for child care and sup- port new entrepreneurial opportunities for blind and disabled Alaskans. No other BEP throughout the country has created such a partnership.”
No meetings of the task force have been scheduled yet.
• Contact Mark Sabbatini at mark.sabbatini@juneauempire.com.
