YORBA LINDA : City Hesitant to Back Study of Child Care

Officials won’t spend $10,000 to fund a child-care study until more is known about the city’s financial condition in the next fiscal year, the City Council decided this week.

The 4-1 vote will stall the study, which was proposed by the Yorba Linda/Placentia Task Force as a way to identify the types of child care needed by the community and options for financing and creating new programs.

The Placentia City Council and the Placentia Unified School District already have committed $12,000 to the study, but Yorba Linda officials were reluctant to take part because of an $800,000 city budget shortfall this year.

“We need professionals to say: ‘Here’s the situation and here’s the possible solution,’ ” Connie Haddad, chairwoman of the task force, told the council. “I know that there are a lot of demands on the city, but this is a cause that we all support, which is children.”

Even so, Councilman Gene Wisner said that the city should not be given the responsibility of financing child care.

“I feel it is a private-sector problem and it should be solved by the private sector,” Wisner said, adding that he had made a campaign promise never to financially support “any social programs of any type.”

But members of the task force said that the city would simply be contributing to a study that could be used to seek donations from private companies for new child-care programs.

“I don’t think we can jump ahead to a solution without getting some verifiable data telling us where we are,” said Karin Freeman, a member of the task force and the school board.

The study would have been conducted by Child Care Planning Associates of Irvine and could cost up to $28,000. The task force had planned to seek an additional $6,000 from private sources.

The study would also suggest ways to care for toddlers and infants. The availability of such programs is limited at public and private facilities because of the high costs, Haddad said. And the problem could worsen in June, when a school district infant- and toddler-care program is expected to close after years of operating in the red, she added.