When my wife and architect, Maggie, and I designed our multi-use office building with affordable apartments on the campus of our assisted living, we built a child care center into the plan from the very beginning. We placed it on the first floor, sprinklered the building, removed thresholds, ensured ample parking and confirmed every building code and life safety requirement was met. The space was intentionally designed so that families could have safe, convenient care right where they work and live.
But even with every physical detail in place, the child care center sat empty for nearly a year. Each time I tried to open it, we hit new procedural snags. Despite being commercially zoned and fully built to standards, we kept getting caught in licensure and approval loops that continued to stall the project. Employees and recruits kept asking when we expected the center to open, and each time we had to share that we had been delayed again. The rooms meant for families became the rooms no one was allowed to use.
Then Jen Legere, owner of A Place to Grow in Brentwood, came in with a fresh set of eyes. She immediately recognized that the center’s small size wasn’t suited to a full commercial child care model. Running it that way — with a director, multiple lead teachers and the staffing structure required — would make the center financially impossible to sustain. But as a family child care program, it could work.
With an owner living on site and overhead kept manageable, the numbers finally made sense. Once we aligned the model correctly, it took only about six weeks to open. The space had been ready all along. The process had not.
Later, when we wanted to open enrollment to the public, we had to go back to the Planning Board again which added months of unnecessary delay. Despite the center already being open and serving employees, local rules forced us to undergo yet another review. While that occurred, we could not provide child care to the families in our community that desperately needed it. Instead, we were forced to tell them that despite our status as a licensed provider already in operation, we couldn’t yet serve them due to local rules.
Since opening in 2022, we have transitioned to having the third owner of this center — proof of how challenging it can be for small child care programs to survive even without administrative and zoning hurdles that drain resources and add to the bottom line. But I’ve also seen the remarkable difference it makes for families. Parents start their day calmer. They’re not rushing out early. Nursing mothers can see their babies on breaks. And as an employer, we benefit from improved attendance, lower stress and a more stable workforce.
This is exactly why HB 1195 is needed.
If a property is already commercially zoned — and already designed with commercial standards in mind — small child care centers serving 30 or fewer children should not have to restart the zoning process from scratch. At that size, issues like parking, traffic, septic capacity and setbacks have long since been addressed. That is why the 30-student threshold makes sense: it aligns with what commercial properties are built to support.
Communities like Dover and Portsmouth want more affordable housing developments. Child care belongs in those communities too. But zoning delays can add months or years to already tight timelines, discouraging small, community-scaled centers that families desperately need. Hand in hand with affordable housing, child care is the one of the top challenges families face today in New Hampshire.
My own experience proved how long a ready-to-go child care space can sit empty because of procedural hurdles.
HB 1195 removes one of the biggest barriers standing in the way of small, practical child care solutions.
For families, for businesses, and for the future of our communities, I hope this bill passes.
John Randolph is the owner of Harmony Homes, an assisted living and memory care facility based in Durham.