Local Measures in California to Fund Child Care Programs on Verge of Victory

Ballot measures to increase local funding for early childhood and youth programs are headed toward victory in three California jurisdictions:

• In Sonoma County, 61% of voters approved a quarter-cent sales tax by to raise about $30 million annually to shore up the county’s crumbling child care system and provide mental health services for the youngest kids.
• In Santa Cruz, a soda tax to raise about $1.3 million annually for services that benefit young people is garnering 51.60% of votes, according to the latest tally announced Wednesday.
• In eastern Los Angeles County, 62% of voters in Pomona have approved a measure to set aside 10% of the city’s budget for children’s programs and services — including child care and housing assistance for families with young children.

The early election results show voters understand that local governments play an important role in providing adequate funding for kids as communities face problems like unaffordable child care, said Margaret Brodkin, founder of Funding The Next Generation, a nonprofit that promotes local ballot initiatives that support children.

“We’ve watched the states struggle and had promises broken. We have no idea what’s going to happen with the federal government at this point, which makes it all the more important to have local communities step up,” she said.

Brodkin led a 1991 ballot initiative in San Francisco that made it the first city in the nation to dedicate a portion of its annual budget to children. Voters reauthorized the Children and Youth Fund twice and passed a measure in 2004 to expand access to preschool for 4-year-olds and in 2018 to impose a commercial rent tax to fund early care and education for infants and toddlers.

Those successful campaigns became models for pro-kid ballot measures in other cities and counties. In the Bay Area, voters in Oakland agreed in 2018 to pay a new parcel tax to expand access to preschool and help high school students prepare for college, and two years later, Alameda County voters approved a 0.5% sales tax to fund child care and health care for the neediest young children.

Anti-tax groups sued to block the San Francisco and Alameda County tax measures, arguing they needed a two-thirds supermajority vote to pass, but state courts ruled initiatives placed on the ballot by private citizens only need a simple majority to win.

The rulings bolstered children’s advocates in Sonoma County, who spent a decade gathering enough support to establish a local funding stream for children’s services.

“We polled many, many times over the years and just could not be confident that we could get two-thirds,” said Angie Dillon-Shore, executive director of First Five Sonoma County.

A simple majority requirement made getting the sales tax measure on this November’s ballot more feasible, she said.

The measure earned support from a broad coalition of local elected officials, business and community organizations, while it had no formal opposition.

The results show voters were frustrated with the shortage of child care in Sonoma County, Dillon-Shore said.

A study found the county lost 450 licensed child care slots after the destructive North Bay wildfires in 2017. After the COVID-19 pandemic, so many child care workers left their jobs that the county was only left with 52% of the slots it once had. That made it hard for parents, especially mothers, to return to work.

“It’s quite clear now that the public knows that child care providers are some of the lowest-paid folks in our economic engine and yet they do some of the most important work,” she said.

Brodkin said getting these measures on a ballot can be a hard sell to voters who aren’t used to voting for children’s services. In 2016, efforts to raise a local tax for that purpose failed in Napa, Marin and Solano counties. In 2022, parcel tax measures to fund child care failed in South San Francisco and Monterey County.

However, she said the strategy works best at the local level when people who are feeling the impact of the problem get organized to campaign for change.

“It’s a wonderful thing for a community to work on because it’s your neighbors, it’s your kids, it’s the childcare center down the street or the family day care home your kids have gone to,” she said. “The results [of new funding] are very palpable for people, and they can immediately appreciate it.”

In Pomona, community advocates spent years pushing for a greater city investment in young people before gathering enough signatures to put a measure on the November ballot, seeking a permanent funding stream for youth services and programs.

The measure, called the Pomona Kids First Initiative, would require the city to spend at least 10% of its budget on kids and create a city Department of Youth & Children to administer the funds.

An opposition campaign, dubbed “Save Our Pomona Public Library,” countered that the measure would lead the city to reduce library hours, police, fire and other essential city services. On its website, it characterized the Heising-Simons Action Fund, a Los Altos-based social welfare organization that donated $160,000 to support the measure, as “Bay Area billionaires who know nothing about Pomona and care even less about the impact of this measure on our city.”

Pomona mayor Tim Sandoval, several city council members and the region’s largest newspaper — the Inland Valley Daily Bulletin — endorsed a no vote.

Supporters credit young people and families for building strong public support for the measure.

“Looking at what’s happening at the state and national level, I think the lesson here is that we need to create more opportunities to empower voters locally,” said Jesus Sanchez, co-founder of the nonprofit Gente Organizada.

“We gave our community a vote in investing in themselves and their kids and their families, and they overwhelmingly decided, yes, that’s the right thing to do,” he said.