'We can't wait' — Kansas lawmakers narrowly advance overhaul of child care regulations

Kansas lawmakers are advancing an overhaul of child care regulations, but supporters don't have enough votes to override a potential veto.

"It's affecting rural. It's affecting urban. It's affecting all demographics," said Sen. Chase Blasi, R-Wichita, one of the lead supporters of the legislation. "Every corner of our state is being impacted by child care, which therefore is hurting our workforce. It's hurting young families."

The contentious debate over the bill largely revolves around supporters arguing that overhauling regulations will lead to more child care availability, while opponents say it will hurt the quality of child care without addressing what they consider to be bigger problems.

"It's really about cramming more children in a smaller space and having them supervised by less well-trained staff," said Sen. Ethan Corson, D-Fairway. "At its base, that's what this bill is about. It's basically saying let's just stack Kansas kids in these facilities and just pack them in there like sardines, as many as we can, with less qualified staff."

House Bill 2344 passed the Senate 21-17 on Thursday. The vote was not without drama, as the initial tally had supporters short one vote, prompting senators to lock themselves in the chamber with a call of the Senate before Sen. Virgil Peck, R-Havana, flip-flopped from no to yes.

The House version is expected to be voted on this week.

The legislation comes as Gov. Laura Kelly, a Democrat, has also called for regulatory reform and other changes to improve access to and availability of quality child care in Kansas. But the governor's plan involves a task force, primarily focused on creating a new state agency, that is not expected to make recommendations until early next year.

Its first meeting is scheduled for Friday.

More:Kansas governor creates task force for cabinet-level child care office via executive order

State agencies in Kelly's administration advised lawmakers against proceeding with the bill.

Kansas Children's Cabinet executive director Melissa Rooker asked lawmakers to wait until her agency and the Kansas Department of Health and Environment finish their comprehensive review of child care regulations. Ashley Goss, a KDHE deputy secretary, raised a litany of concerns with the details of the plan.

Some lawmakers and lobbyists don't want to wait on a regulatory process that is notoriously slow to make changes.

"We've got to do something," said Andrew Wiens, a lobbyist for Florida-based Opportunity Solutions Project. "I understand KDHE is working on a study as mentioned previously and that's great, but I think we can't afford to wait."

Opponents say Kansas bill was too rushed

The Senate plan, developed by Blasi and Sen. Kristen O'Shea, R-Topeka, was originally contained in SB 282. After amending the bill, the Senate Commerce Committee put it in HB 2344.

Meanwhile, the House had no equivalent legislation, but the House Health and Human Services Committee opted to borrow the language from the amended SB 282 for its own gut-and-go of SB 96.

"Something had to move forward," said Rep. Brenda Landwehr, R-Wichita and the committee chair. "We can't wait another year; we can't wait another two years, and I think that that's about what it would take to go through the rules and regs process."

Landwehr's committee never had a bill hearing, instead opting for an "informational hearing" that focused on supporter testimony and gave little opportunity for opponents to voice concerns.

"I understand the crisis that is going on, I get it," said Rep. Susan Ruiz, D-Shawnee and the committee's top Democrat. "But to have to rush this bill, I don't understand that. So I just feel like we needed more time to be able to totally study this bill and have conferees who are opponents."

The House committee brought the support of two young female legislators.

"As a mom with young kids and being in the Legislature, child care is very important," said Rep. Laura Williams, R-Lenexa. "And for me, I lose money being here every day because child care costs more than what I make."

"I've been on a waitlist for child care for two and a half years and I'm not even pregnant yet," said Rep. Tory Marie Blew, R-Great Bend. "So clearly there's a problem and something needs to be done about it."

The bill struggled to get out of the Senate committee, needing a tiebreaker vote from the chair as two Republicans sided with Democrats to vote against it.

"I got almost 300 emails — not five or 10, almost 300 — against this bill," said Sen. Mary Ware, D-Wichita. "That's a pretty clear statement to me."

The details of the regulatory overhaul were still being amended when the bill hit the floor.

"People who even still today oppose the bill, we spent time to ask them, 'We know you oppose this, but what edits would you make, what changes would you make?' and we've incorporated many of those," O'Shea said.

One of the changes was to ensuring the state fire marshal could still enforce their requirements.

"Now we're doing last-minute changes on the floor," said Sen. Tom Holland, D-Baldwin City. "I would just respectfully once again request that we defeat this bill. Let's be sure the next time we do this we have all the stakeholders in a position to provide input we need to get a quality work product."

Debate pits quantity vs. quality of child care

Supporters of the bill argue that regulatory reform will cut through government red tape hindering the child care industry from offering more slots.

"The bureaucracy has created this issue," said Rep. Doug Blex, R-Independence.

But opponents argue the legislation will harm quality of care.

"You can't just have anybody come in and babysit for you," Ruiz said. "They are educated, they're trained and we need to treat them as professionals."

Sen. Molly Baumgardner, R-Louisburg, who regularly goes toe-to-toe with Kelly's Department for Children and Families on child welfare oversight, raised concerns that less stringent regulations could lead to an increase in negligent care and lack of supervision.

"There's a lot of regulations that are on the books that aren't going away to ensure that there are safety parameters put in place," Blasi said.

More:How safe is too safe? Kansas lawmakers want to tackle child care regulations

Supporters also argue that it is better to get a child into a licensed facility than forcing parents to turn to unregulated care, such as relying on grandparents.

"This bill has nothing to do with making safe child care options available for our Kansas families," Holland said. "This is all about deregulation. ... What this bill before you would basically try to sell you, the elixir of, 'Hey if we just somehow have more slots, more kids per cribs, less square footage per tot,' that things are going to be great."

Child care slots in Kansas have decreased

Blasi contended that KDHE has imposed increased restrictions on providers, and "because of these restrictions, we've lost hundreds of providers over the last several years, and therefore we have lost thousands of slots for Kansas children."

He pointed to a report last spring from Child Care Aware of Kansas showing that between 2019 and May 2021, Kansas lost 78 total child care providers and 938 total child care slots of desired capacity.

While those declines coincided with COVID-19 pandemic years, they were a continuation of an existing trend.

Online data from KDHE shows the total number of licensed providers and their total capacity as of June 30 of 2013 through 2022. Both have generally been trending down and took further hits during the pandemic, though capacity did increase in 2022 from both the previous year and 2019, with roughly 135,500 slots across about 4,400 providers.

That's compared to about 4,900 providers with roughly 135,000 slots in 2019, and about 6,200 providers with roughly 139,000 slots in 2013.

Much of the drop in slots can be attributed primarily to far fewer day care homes, while the additions of more child care centers and school-age programs have created more slots, but not as many as have been lost.

"These regulations are creating a major burden on them, which is why they're leaving the workforce," Blasi said. "We cannot deny that the regulations is a part of the problem in the state of Kansas."

Sen. Pat Pettey, D-Kansas City, said low wages are to blame. Kansas Action for Children reported the median wage for a child care worker in Kansas is $10.90 an hour.

"How long are they going to stay?" Pettey said "That's one of our biggest issues: turnover."

Pettey said providers have said they "could have a higher capacity, but they don't have staff."

Child Care Aware of Kansas testified that thousands of licensed slots are already going unused by providers for a variety of reasons, including staffing shortages.

Arguing that the regulatory changes would lead to burnout among workers, Ware predicted the bill "would result in a shrinking of quality child care slots available to families, not an increase, due to the loss of workers."

Sen. Mark Steffen, R-Hutchinson, had his own reason for opposing the bill.

"What's important to me is parents with their kids, mothers with their kids — families, strong families, functional families — far more important than expanding day care," he said. "That's where our problem lies. That's where our state's problems lies."

This article originally appeared on Topeka Capital-Journal: Kansas bill on child care regulation overhaul struggles to pass