Dan Haar: Lamont will propose a large child care expansion for CT. What will it look like?

CT Insider – Tuesday, February 4, 2025
By Dan Haar

With the unworkable costs of child care hurting communities in all sorts of ways, Gov. Ned Lamont will propose a large allotment in his budget address Wednesday to jump start a fund that would eventually make a dent in the crisis.

The governor’s budget is expected to include hundreds of millions of dollars for early childhood care and education, most of it from a projected state surplus. Rather than use the cash to help families and community groups provide child care immediately in the upcoming fiscal year, the money would go into an early childhood trust fund, which Lamont and lawmakers created last year.

Lamont is expected to focus on pre-kindergarten, that is, care and education for children ages 3 and 4.

Advocates and providers would welcome any significant influx of money into the strapped child care universe, of course. There are two questions:

First, why create a long-term fund rater than allocating money out of the state’s $26 billion-plus operating budget? It’s not just record-keeping; the answer matters a lot.

And second, how should the state best spend money on early childhood care, considering we now have a dense patchwork of programs and offerings in place that cost either taxpayers, employers or families somewhere between $8,000 and $25,000 per year per child?

The short answer for the second question, how best to do this, is that advocates and providers say families would be best served by looking broadly at all age groups, even if that only solves a smaller piece of the problem.

“Hopefully as advocates we’re trying to focus on a solution that’s transformative with the ages zero to 12 years old. In order to get to all of those ages we know that we have to start with zero first,” said Eva Bermúdez Zimmerman, director of Child Care For CT , a coalition pushing for deep reform.

“You can’t create a program that only focuses on one solution,” she added. “You need a truly holistic approach to how you fix child care.”

A top-to-bottom fix could cost $1.5 billion or so, and that’s not in the picture. Obviously, the right answer is to do what we can. That brings us to the first question: why the fund?

Connecticut has a strict spending limit that will allow new spending to total 5.1 percent in the fiscal year that starts July 1. That’s about $1 billion for regular state programs. Seems like enough to add some child care, but no, as it happens, the increase will barely cover what the state is doing now.

Enter the fund. Connecticut continues to run big surpluses every year. The idea would be to put enough money into the fund from those surpluses that proceeds from the fund would eventually grow large enough to make a difference in child care.

And the key point: Money spent from the fund would be exempt from the spending cap. This has a lot of support but it could be controversial among cap hawks, mainly Republicans. Currently, the surplus mostly goes to pay down the underfunded state employee and teachers’ pensions.

House Speaker Matt Ritter, D-Hartford, has long supported added money for child care and named that pressing need as a priority if we were to find creative uses for the surpluses.

“If we put a couple hundred million dollars in child care to get people back to work, and then the pension fund got $1.1 billion, as opposed to $1.4 billion, I don’t think the average person my caucus has a problem with that,” Ritter told my colleague Alex Putterman in a recent interview.

As to how exactly the money would be spent in the end, that’s a matter of much discussion. There are subsidies to families, subsidies to providers, tax credits to families and employers and all manner of creative ideas.

All of it costs a lot, but then, we’re spending a lot now in the form of lower wages and less productivity for parents who can’t work eeven if they have only one or two children in need of care. It’s an investment in the economy, using surplus money in that way. Of course, we can say just about any smart social or educational outlay is an investment, but Ritter and others prefer to focus on something transformational.

“I would want to use it for massive investments in something that really moved the needle,” Ritter told Putterman. “And in the case of child care, getting people back to work, that just means that they’re working and making money and paying taxes and spending it.”

That idea of sweeping change comes up a lot in these conversations. “We know that the governor is dedicated to creating a child care plan that supports families and children,” said Bermúdez Zimmerman, a former candidate for lieutenant governor. “We’re excited that he understands how bad and how difficult is is for parents.”

The trust fund approach requires patience as the money grows, which may be better than what we’ve seen so far. The wild card, of course, is federal subsidies that could dry up under President Donald Trump.

“People have promised us many things and every time they try to implement it, things don’t turn out to be as good as they were promised,” said Merrill Gay, executive director of the Hartford-based Early Childhood Alliance, with many providers as members.

Gay and Bermúdez Zimmerman explained why a new state initiative should start at birth. That’s where child care slots are most scarce and most expensive. Also, adding free pre-K for, say, all children ages 3 and 4 would remove many of them from programs that rely on having children at that age to help pay for the more expensive baby and toddler care.

For now, as Lamont pitches his budget, Gay told me, “I’m not going to let the perfect be the enemy of the good.”

Access this article at its original source.