If there’s one thing about child care that everyone from parents to providers to politicians can agree about, it’s that something needs to change.
Full-time care for a couple of kids can cost more than one parent’s entire salary, preschools have yearslong waiting lists, and the costs for providers are going up just as fast as the costs for parents.
For many parents, the ideal situation is a high quality day care center located right at their workplace: Take the kids to work with you, maybe visit them at lunch, take them home whenever you’re done. That setup is rare, though a few of Ventura County’s larger employers, including Patagonia, Amgen and the Ventura County Community College District, have offered it for years.
Now, U.S. Rep. Salud Carbajal, a Santa Barbara Democrat whose district includes Ventura and Ojai, has introduced a bill that aims to make the arrangement more common, by increasing the tax credit for companies to provide on-site or off-site child care and allowing smaller businesses to team up and share the tax benefits.
On Wednesday, Carbajal visited the Great Pacific Child Development Center, the day care and preschool that the outdoor apparel company Patagonia has operated in Ventura since 1983. He toured the facility, played with some Tonka trucks, met some preschoolers and their parents and touted Patagonia as a model for his legislation.
“Child care has become a crisis, and it’s an economic issue,” Carbajal said. “It keeps people out of the workforce, if they can’t find decent, affordable child care.”
Companies like Patagonia that offer child care for their employees are eligible for a tax credit equal to 25% of the cost of providing the care, with a cap of $150,000 per year for each business. Carbajal’s bill would increase the tax credit to 50% of the cost of care and raise the cap to $500,000. For small businesses with 200 or fewer employees, the credit would be 60% and the cap would be $600,000 per year.
The tax benefit would let employers pass the savings on to parents who use the company child care. Companies could claim the credit either by operating their own day care center, like Patagonia does; by teaming up with other businesses to run a day care cooperative; or by contracting with an existing preschool or day care center to reserve slots for their employees’ children.
Those options exist today — except for the option to join with another business and share the tax credit — but they’re rarely used. In 2016, the child care tax credit accounted for less than 0.02% of business tax benefits, said Ian Mariani, a spokesman for Carbajal.
“More business would do it if the incentive, the tax credit, was more substantial,” Carbajal said.
Carbajal’s bill is bipartisan — of its 42 cosponsors in the House of Representatives, seven are Republican, and the Senate version was co-sponsored by Alabama Republican Katie Britt. It has the support of both local and national chambers of commerce, and Carbajal is optimistic it will be included in some form in a package of tax legislation that’s likely to pass next year.
Even with bigger tax incentives, most businesses are unlikely to get into the child care business. Carbajal’s proposed legislation would also increase the amount of pre-tax money that families can put into flexible spending accounts for any qualified child care expenses, from $5,000 per year to $10,000, plus another $2,000 per child.
‘It’s a big sacrifice’
Contracting with a preschool to provide child care should be more feasible for most businesses than operating a stand-alone day care center, but it’s so rare that Victoria Shevkunova, the owner of Ventura Children’s Learning Center, said she’s never encountered it.
“That would be great. I would love that, if a business wanted to reserve spaces for their employees,” she said. “If companies can help their employees with child care it would be beneficial for everyone, including myself.”
Shevkunova’s preschool in East Ventura has 110 kids, from 8 weeks to 6 years old, and 27 teachers. Full-time care for the youngest ones — 11 hours a day, five days a week — is $500 a week, and for the older kids, it’s $365 a week.
“I have to increase my rates every year because of inflation,” Shevkunova said. “We pay teachers more to keep up with inflation. In this state fast food workers make $20 an hour now, so I have to pay more than that or no one will work for me. They would rather be flipping burgers.”
Those rates are pretty typical. Brea Olmstead, a Ventura resident who works for an out-of-state marketing agency with a remote workforce, said she pays between $3,500 and $4,000 a month for all-day care for her two children, who are 3 and 5 years old.
“You can take a middle-income salary in our community and basically trade it one-for-one in some cases for the cost of child care,” she said.
Spending about $45,000 a year on child care means Olmstead and her husband can’t put as much toward savings or debt as they’d like to. They left Ventura for a cheaper part of the state last year, but wound up moving back after four months. Olmstead’s husband is a contractor, so they were able to buy a house that most people wouldn’t be able to renovate on their budget.
“We did not really index for the amount of budget it would require to become parents,” she said. “It’s really changed our finances and our ability to plan for the future. It’s a worthy sacrifice, but it’s a big sacrifice.”
And aside from the cost, obtaining a spot in the right preschool can be a chore, especially for parents who need all-day care. Olmstead said she was on a waiting list for about 10 months to get her children enrolled.
Her friend, Alison Espínola, is a social worker for a nonprofit organization in Santa Barbara. She has a 1-year-old who stays home with a family member and a 4-year-old in preschool, which costs between $1,400 and $1,800 a month.
“How do we afford that? It’s a really good question. I don’t really know,” she said. “We’re really lucky. I have a master’s degree and I make pretty good money, and my husband started his own business and he’s making good money. But this eats up all the disposable income.”
Preschool tuition goes up every year, she said, but it’s still cheaper than a nanny. Having family around helps. It means the younger one can stay home, and there’s someone to take care of the 4-year-old before and after preschool, so Espínola only has to pay for six hours a day of care, rather than eight or more.
Employer-provided care sounds like “a fabulous idea,” she said, but she’d rather see something that goes farther: a government subsidy that parents can use for any type of child care that suits their family.
“I’m glad they’re introducing this bill,” Espínola said. “I think it’s really needed. Anything the government can do to help families is a step in the right direction. Things are extremely stressful for parents, and child care is just one of those things. Children’s well-being is directly correlated to how their parents are doing, so if their parents are really stressed out and they can’t afford child care, it’s going to impact the kid and their well-being and future success in life.”
Cost of care forces hard choices
Child care has been expensive for generations, but never more expensive than it is now. According to a recent report from the accounting firm KPMG, the cost of child care in the United States went up by 263% between January 1991 and April 2024, about twice the rate of overall inflation.
And inflation in recent years has been even more pronounced in child care than in the economy as a whole: According to a Bank of America study, the average American family’s child care costs went up 32% between 2019 and 2024, a time when overall inflation was about 22%.
Costs in child care are going up for the same reason they’ve gone up in other service industries, said Petra Puls, the executive director of First 5 Ventura County, a nonprofit that provides state-funded preschool and other services for young children and their families. There are shortages of workers in early childhood education, and preschools have to pay a premium to keep them. On top of that, coastal California is an expensive place for any business, with rent, insurance and taxes and other expenses going up every year.
Child care is essential to the entire economy, not just the child care industry, Puls said. Business leaders have been working with the County of Ventura to help the county update its Economic Vitality Strategic Plan, and child care has been in the front of their minds, with First 5 participating in some of the meetings.
“In many sectors, there’s a workforce shortage, and one of the contributing factors is lack of available, affordable, quality, culturally appropriate child care,” Puls said. “Some employees, especially younger moms, have to make a choice between, ‘Do I go back to work and pay most of my salary in child care, or do I just stay home with my child until they go to school?’ That certainly contributes to a lack of qualified people in the workforce.”
Employer-provided care isn’t free, but it usually costs a little less than comparable care at independent preschools. Bianca Botta, who works in marketing at Patagonia, said she pays about $2,000 a month for full-time care for her 7-month-old, Luca. For a school that emphasizes the outdoors, global citizenship and social and emotional development, that’s a competitive rate, especially for a child so young. And Botta said she can’t put a price on having her son just across the courtyard at work.
“Without this, I don’t know if I could have come back to work,” she said. “I can’t imagine taking him to a day care in the morning and not seeing him all day. Here, I can come see him between meetings, bring him to lunch with me. It’s amazing. I was worried about coming back to work, but having this child care here makes it so easy. … You’d think more companies would have this.”
Tony Biasotti is an investigative and watchdog reporter for the Ventura County Star. Reach him at tbiasotti@vcstar.com. This story was made possible by a grant from the Ventura County Community Foundation’s Fund to Support Local Journalism.
