City and Neighborhood Differ Strongly on Bailey Daycare

The possible closing of the daycare program at Bailey Community Center will be discussed tonight at City Council's work session, and tensions are expected to be high. Many members of the Bailey neighborhood have been strongly opposed to the possible closing, partly out of fear that the move is a step towards the City closing and possibly selling off the Community Center building altogether. Meanwhile, the City has made clear that the net operating loss plus the sense that the City should not be in the daycare business means City staff will continue to actively pursue closure of the daycare program.

I asked two residents of Bailey as well as Parks, Recreation & Arts Director Tim McCaffrey for their views. (McCaffrey heads the City unit that oversees the daycare.)

Roy Saper, owner of Saper Galleries and a forty-year resident of Bailey, plans to speak at Council tonight. He questions why the City has not supported the daycare in a fashion that would ensure its success. He also questions the City's decision to attribute such a high percentage of the costs of maintaining the building to the daycare, an accounting approach that he feels leaves the daycare with more financial blame than it is due. Saper plans to tell Council, "Not only is that unreasonable, it is also likely disingenuous and an inaccurate apportionment of expenses without basis." (Saper's letter is reproduced with permission here.)

I asked McCaffrey about how the costs of the building are apportioned in the City's calculations. The City currently attributes 80% of the Bailey Community Center cost to the daycare. McCaffrey explains, "The childcare program at Bailey is the primary user of the facility. Another minority user is the summer camp and the before-and-after school program for its break care program. So that program is assigned twenty percent of the expenses. With the daycare as majority user of the space, that’s how we arrive at extending that level of cost for recovery of the day-to-day operations of the facility."

McCaffrey indicated in our interview that the approach to Hannah Community Center is different: "What we do there is we have a separate operations budget for the building and then, when various programs use the space, we charge a kind of internal rental charge." He explained, "Our reason is there is a wider range of activities at Hannah Community Center so it’s not like there is one single use. There is a much wider use."

The Hannah Community Center, like the Bailey Community Center, operates at a significant financial loss each year. McCaffrey says Hannah must be considered differently: "What we have at the Hannah center is, first of all, we had the voter approval for the renovation of the Hannah Center as a community center. It passed by a significant percentage. We had voter approval. I think although we were hoping that there would be the opportunity to recover a good portion of the expenses associated with operating the building, there was an understanding there would always be an operating deficit for that particular facility."

McCaffrey added, "I would like to figure out ways to reduce [the operating loss] there. We’d like to figure out how to reduce operating deficits in all areas of our operation." In fact, many of the facilities operated by Parks, Recreation & Arts run at a deficit, which impacts the City's budget significantly. The soccer complex, for example, operates at a net loss. Says McCaffrey, "it was an improvement done as a result of the 1995 bond issue. There’s a maintenance cost associated with maintaining the facility as a soccer complex and as a general park area. In some respects, it is similar to other parks in the park system where we don’t have an ability to recover all of our expenses through fees."

In the 2012 budget, the Bailey daycare was showing an operating profit. The situation changed shortly thereafter. I asked McCaffrey what changed. He replied: "A combination of things happened. We had looked at our classrooms, and they were being staffed by two lead caregivers with room leaders, and we reorganized based on state requirements to have all classrooms staffed by lead caregivers. When we did that, at the same time we improved the compensation for the lead caregivers and although the improved compensation is modest by comparison to many other positions or careers, nonetheless the expense was significant for our program. At the same time we were relying on enrollment to increase and it never did. We never saw the increase in enrollment materialize."

McCaffrey and his staff are recommending closing the infant and toddler daycare at Bailey at the end of June, 2015, and closing the pre-K program at the end of August, 2015. The delay is meant to give families time to find alternative care.

Sally Silver, who lives a half-block from the Bailey Community Center, worries that the daycare's closing "will lead to the closing of the center, which I consider essential to the stability of the central part of the Bailey neighborhood, which is fragile." She also raises questions about how the process of considering closure has played out: "The neighborhood should be given much more time to learn about and respond to the proposal to close the program, which was only put forward in a formal way in the [City Council's] work session's agenda on Friday."

McCaffrey makes clear that he believes the City should not be in the daycare business, as he says it is not in the City's "core competencies" area. Saper and Silver, by contrast, argue that the City needs to understand that support of the daycare and the community center means support for the urban neighborhoods, young families, and parents who come to East Lansing to work, groups that the City often claims to value.

Saper plans to tell the City Council tonight, "You have the power to invest rather than divest, to grow rather than to destroy, to market rather than to ignore, to achieve rather than fail the community."

Last November, the Bailey Community Center appeared on a list of "development-ready properties" provided by the City Planning staff. I asked Lori Mullins of Planning today whether the Center is still on the list of buildings to be sold and developed. As of press time, I have not received a reply.

City Council’s work session will take place at the courtroom located in City Hall on Tuesday, September 23, at 7 pm. The meeting opens with an opportunity for any citizen to comment on this and any other matter of concern.

For our previous report on this issue, click here.

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