Jennifer Legere considered herself an expert in zoning requirements, fire codes and site plan reviews.
Her 21 years of experience as an entrepreneur had required her to learn many of these technicalities as she opened up more and more child care centers in New Hampshire.
Legere, founder of A Place to Grow, spent over two years finding her flagship location before she landed on a 13-acre property in Brentwood. It would take another eight months for the center to open.
She navigated planning board meetings and building codes that were unfamiliar to her on top of following licensing rules. When she was about to open, she made an “expensive mistake” and was informed she had to pay an extra $30,000 to install proper firewalls.
“I think it was two months that we ended up being delayed because we had to find someone to do all this work for us now, and I had to take out another loan for construction before my business had even opened, even though I thought I was doing all of the right things and asking all of the right questions,” Legere said.
Legere’s struggle to navigate complicated requirements is one many care providers face when trying to open day care centers in New Hampshire. Advocates view one piece of legislation, House Bill 1195, as the first step in simplifying that process, centralizing rules and lowering barriers to opening child care facilities throughout the state.
The bill proposes that child care centers with 30 or fewer children be allowed to operate on commercially-zoned land, as long as they follow state licensing requirements. The bill also proposes eliminating local site plans for home-based child care out of a residential property. It passed in the House of Representatives and is expected to move forward in the Senate without much deliberation.
David Paige, a state representative from Conway and prime sponsor of the bill, said New Hampshire’s child care system is about 10,000 slots short because of many factors like affordability. Local zoning rules layered on top of state child care regulations have only added to the crisis.
“It has made it essentially impossible to open child care,” he said. “We have been picking away at that problem, so it’s been in discussion for years, and this is really a natural next step to ensure that we aren’t unreasonably zoning child care opportunity out.”
A lack of child care centers has a deep effect on the state’s workforce. Natch Greyes, the vice president of public policy at the Business Industry Association, estimates that between 5,000 and 10,000 abled-bodied Granite Staters do not work because they can’t find child care.
He said the bill moves the business community toward a solution.
“Getting enough child care throughout the state, so anyone who wants it has access, is really important to the business community,” Greyes said. “There are people who want to start a family, but also want to remain the workforce … and it’s incredibly important that we get to give them that option.”
During a Senate committee hearing on the bill Tuesday, Trina Ingelfinger underscored Greyes’s point. Ingelfinger, the policy director for early care and education for nonprofit New Futures, testified that the state is losing out on hundreds of millions of dollars because of lost workforce participation.
“Studies recently [show] that our young workforce are very concerned about child care, and it may be an issue that is starting to cause young families to leave the state,” she said.
A member of the Senate Election Law and Municipal Affairs Committee, which heard the bill, Sen. Rebecca Perkins Kwoka told Ingelfinger that her third child was waitlisted behind 170 children for a spot at a day care on the Seacoast.
Kwoka doesn’t know any mother who hasn’t struggled with being able to work full-time because of a lack of access to child care. She turned to Ingelfinger and asked if she could believe either of those realities.
“I would believe it,” Ingelfinger replied. “It’s really complicated, and families are forced to make really unique and complex decisions about how they want to raise their families, because we just don’t have the infrastructure to support them right now.”
Greyes said many concerns that were brought out from both the House and Senate hearings were about specific things like traffic mitigation, types of fencing and even pools. What they all boiled down to, he said, was ensuring the safety of children.
The bill does not propose any changes to child care licensing requirements, which address a bulk of those concerns. Almost all testimony submitted expressed support for the bill, which lawmakers from both parties have backed.
Soon after the hearing, the committee unanimously passed the bill on consent. Unless senators pull the item off the consent calendar for additional debate, it will most likely go to the governor’s desk next week.
Rep. David Paige said the passage of this bill won’t address all the issues in child care, like increasing wages or recruiting providers, but it will at least open more spots for families in need of child care.
“It’s not the whole solution but it’s an important piece of the solution,” he said.
