Welcome back to this weekly meeting of the Health and Safety Committee with Denver City Council.

Coverage of the Health and Safety Committee starts now.

Good morning and welcome to the June 17th Health and Safety Committee meeting.

My name is Daryl Watson.

I'm honored to serve as the chair of this committee, as well as a city council member representing all of the fine district nine.

We have one action item this morning, a public comment, and four items on consent.

But before we roll to the action item, I'll start first in a room with introductions and I'll go online for any of the council members that are signing in virtually, and we'll start on my right.

Oh, on the right.

Okay.

Uh Kevin Flynn, Southwest Denver's District 2.

I was going to do a home alone.

Kevin!

It was the under the younger leader.

I almost formed drivers yet because of that.

Good morning.

Paul Cashman, South Denver District.

District 6.

And for our council members are online, I believe that we have Councilmember Sawyer and Councilmember Parity.

Sawyer first.

Good morning, Amanda Sawyer, District 5.

And I don't believe we have Councilmember Parity quite yet.

That is fine.

Well, we have a presentation from our good friends from the uh from OCA, the uh Office of Children Affairs.

And I want to turn them over to them for introductions, and the floor is yours for your presentation.

Awesome.

Thank you, McCouncilman.

Uh thank you, Councilman Watson.

And I'm actually really excited that uh OCA is joined by some friends.

Um my name is Ray Katares, I lead the policy work in OCA, but I'm joined by some friends from some other agencies, so I'll toss it over to them to introduce themselves.

Hi everyone, I'm Abby Soysan.

I'm a senior policy analyst with the Department of Licensing and Consumer Protection, formerly excise and licenses.

Hi everyone, I'm Nicole Caldwell with DDPHE, and I'm a manager in our public health investigations division overseeing the child care program.

Awesome.

Well, we're really excited to be here because you've seen this group effort.

We can roll in with a big squad today, um, because of this change that we're going to be proposing.

So we're gonna be talking today about um streamlining the process for child care providers to open and operate um here in the city and county of Denver by removing a local license requirement.

Um so just to go over a little bit of the agenda, we'll give you a little bit of the state of play currently for child care in Denver.

We'll um talk a little bit about how this multi-agency group has come together, and then we'll also um we'll get into why we're removing this license and where we see the redundancy, uh, and then we'll also get into how we're gonna maintain some enforcement on the back end, outline what we think the impact is, and then start talking about what the next steps will look like for child care here in Denver.

So here's our proposed change in one slide.

Uh we're proposing to remove the Denver business license for child care uh licensing without any changes to the health and safety standards or requirements that currently exist.

Um, mostly to update uh to become in uh in alignment with the state's licensing process and to remove the redundancies for child care providers.

So the state of play here for child care.

Um, I think anyone with kids or who knows someone who has young kids in Denver or anywhere in the country would uh tell you that child care we're in a child care crisis.

Um, and it goes both on the supply and the cost of care for infants and toddlers.

Uh the average cost of care in Denver for infants and toddlers, so anyone who's zero to three years old is right around $20,000 on an annual budget.

Um, and I'm looking around the room and I'm seeing some um some faces like that is even far too low for what they're experiencing.

Um, but that average is right around $20,000.

Just for some perspective, that's 18 to 25% of a family's uh annual income.

And if you're a single parent, that number jumps up to about 40 percent.

Um, the rate of inflation for child care has outpaced inflation for most other grades and services in our economy, just from 2020 to 2024.

The rate of inflation for child care was at 29 percent.

Again, just vastly outpacing anybody's ability to keep up with cost.

Part of that is because when uh the pandemic hit child care centers were some of the most impacted.

Um, but they were also some of the fastest to get online because we knew what the economic uh impact and what the economic value was for those centers being opened so that parents could go to work.

Um, and Colorado uh is one of the most expensive places for child care in the country.

We rank seventh in terms of average cost, and that is largely being driven by the cost of care here in the city and county.

Um, that number is Denver is about forty-nine percent higher than the uh national average for child care.

So the and this graph on the right shows that we are just not even close to hitting the supply.

We have about 31,000 kids, better between that zero and three age range, and we have about 4,000 license slots for those kids.

Now not every uh family chooses license care, and that's totally uh reasonable, but we don't even have that option right now for families, and that scarcity is what's driving a lot of the cost.