Lawsuit From Napa Neighbors Could Block Much-Needed Child Care Expansion

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or every 10 babies in Napa County, there’s just one licensed infant care slot. The demand for day care is so high that parents get on waitlists as soon as they’re pregnant.

Brenae Royal found that out the hard way when she went back to work as a vineyard operations manager two months after giving birth to her son, King. She needed to oversee an event, and her partner couldn’t afford to take time off his job as chef of a hotel restaurant. So she brought her baby to work.

“We were warned that finding child care could be challenging, but I just didn’t give it the weight it deserved,” Royal said. “I had no idea it was to that degree.”

During the harvest season, Royal paid a nanny $30 an hour to care for King while she worked long hours to oversee the grape picking. However, the nanny eventually left for a higher-paying job as a night nurse, leaving the couple to juggle work and caregiving until they found an opening at Le Petit Elephant, the largest nursery and preschool in Napa County.

Le Petit Elephant’s owner, Milli Pintacsi, has a plan to move into a bigger facility and double her capacity, allowing her to serve more families like Royal’s, but a lawsuit from neighbors is threatening the expansion. The story playing out in this small Napa neighborhood highlights just how difficult it is to tackle the child care shortage that is putting the squeeze on families across the country.

Le Petit Elephant cares for 128 children out of a former Christian school in a densely packed neighborhood of apartment buildings, businesses and homes. The lease for this property will end in December 2025. Last year, Pintacsi was awarded $2.8 million in federal and state grants, meant to help the child care industry recover from the pandemic, to move into a bigger, more permanent space.

Pintacsi found a vacant church in Alta Heights, a hillside neighborhood of single-family homes, and outbid a few developers to buy it.

“It’s a property that is perfect for this,” she said.

The 20,000-square-foot church has a large parking lot, a lawn that could become a play yard and 18 rooms that could be converted into infant- and toddler-care rooms.

The church also has a multipurpose room, complete with a basketball court, stage and kitchen. Pintacsi wants to rent it out for after-school care, day camps, birthday parties, puppet shows and other kid-oriented activities. The revenue would help cover child care costs for some families who receive financial aid and provide a livable wage for their teachers.

“We would be able to have things for families to do in Napa, and we’d be able to raise money for more scholarships and teachers to be paid better so they can afford to live in Napa,” she said.

However, longtime residents of Alta Heights oppose the project, saying that having such a big day care with multiple uses would increase noise and traffic, which may affect evacuations during a wildfire. They packed a planning commission meeting to voice their concerns, and after the panel approved the project, they appealed the decision to the city council.

At the council meeting, they waved signs that said, “Safety First Alta Heights.”

Supporters of the preschool waved their own signs that declared: “Babies Over NIMBYS.”

The council rejected their appeal in May after finding that it wouldn’t significantly impact traffic and placing a limit on the types and size of events that would be allowed in the multipurpose room.

However, the project has been held up since three neighbors filed a lawsuit under the California Environmental Quality Act, or CEQA, demanding the city rescind approval of the project until a more thorough environmental impact review is conducted.

The plaintiffs declined to be interviewed, citing ongoing settlement talks and being the target of disparaging remarks. They were singled out in a website created by a group of parents who are supporters of both Le Petit Elephant and  It Takes A Village, a nonprofit group raising funds for the preschool.

Lawmakers established CEQA in 1970 to better protect the environment from development. But in recent years, the statute has drawn criticism as it’s been used as a tool to block housing and infrastructure projects. Developers are often compelled to do costly environmental impact studies, scale back their projects or face long delays, said Chris Elmendorf, a land use and housing expert at UC Davis School of Law.

“If you’ve got the ability to force a delay of a couple of years at an expense of a couple hundred thousand dollars onto a project, you have a lot of leverage to negotiate for any kind of side arrangement that you’d like,” Elmendorf said.

He cited a lawsuit that delayed the construction of a much-needed student housing project at UC Berkeley for three years and ignited a fierce debate over CEQA. Two neighborhood groups sought to argue under the environmental law that noise generated by future student residents would be a form of pollution and demanded that the university study the impacts on neighbors.

Pintacsi hopes to reach a deal so she can begin renovating the classrooms. Already, the legal fees have drained her financial aid fund, and she’s running out of time to renovate the classrooms or find another facility before her lease ends.

She said the church is the best option she found in her yearslong search for a suitable and affordable site for her preschool.

“There are no buildings that I can just jump to if this neighborhood doesn’t accept us,” she said.

It’s not easy to find a facility in a high-rent and well-developed city like Napa that meets zoning and licensing requirements for child care, said Daniel Sanchez, who’s in charge of Napa County’s distribution of federal pandemic aid to child care providers.

“There’s not a huge amount of buildings turning over or going for sale, much less a huge amount of appropriate buildings that could be used for child care,” Sanchez said.

Nick Burton, a small business consultant who helped Pintacsi look for another site for Le Petit Elephant, said the only other viable location was near two cannabis businesses.

Infant care is sorely lacking in the county because it’s not financially viable: providers have to meet tougher requirements than they do for toddler care, including a ratio of one adult for every four babies and a limit of four infants per home-based day care.

Sanchez cited a 2022 study of the region’s child care market, which found that providers also had a hard time hiring and retaining workers. Their median salaries of $20 to $25 per hour weren’t enough to cover Napa’s high cost of living.

“Those are some of the reasons why larger [child care] chains won’t come here,” Sanchez said.

The study also found that after-hours child care was also badly needed for hospitality and restaurant employees who work night or weekend shifts.

Royal said the full-time child care her son receives from Le Petit Elephant amounts to 25% of her salary, but she couldn’t do without it because she doesn’t have relatives close by to help her. If the preschool closes, she said she may have to move out of the region and leave behind her career in the wine industry.

“Napa would not be Napa without the labor and the livelihoods of people who need child care,” she said. “We are raising the next generation of citizens that are going to be growing up in Napa, and Milli’s school is providing this amazing foundation [for children] who are going to contribute positively when they become young adults. And you need that to sustain a community.”

Correction: A previous version of this story incorrectly stated the total amount of the government grants awarded to Pintacsi, and the group behind the website that singled out plaintiffs in the lawsuit. The story has been updated.