Council Set to Decide Fate of Bailey Daycare and Community Center

Image: Courtesy of City of East Lansing

City Council is now set to decide the fate of the Bailey childcare program and the Bailey Community Center next Tuesday. Members of the Bailey neighborhood told Council last night that this means they are essentially also deciding the fate of the Bailey neighborhood itself.

As ELi has reported, City staff has been telling Council that the costs of maintaining the daycare and the community center in which it is housed are too high. Planning staff this week put forth a plan for deciding what to do next with the community center—a plan that considers selling it to a developer.

Last night at Council, the “Bailey Parents Working Group” presented an extremely detailed financial and management proposal to ensure the future of the daycare and the community center at as low a cost as possible to the City. The proposal also provides a way for the City to get out of the daycare business, as staff has wanted, by having someone else run the daycare. (See the proposal here and here.)

As a result, next week Council will decide whether to give the daycare another year of financial and administrative support—easily long enough, the daycare parents’ group says, to stabilize the program and find someone other than the City to run it—or whether to shut it down.

If the daycare closes, as the City adminstration seeks to do in June of this year, the Community Center will also be closed as a community center. Staff told Council last night it would be locked up and periodically checked by maintenance staff while the City decides what to do with the building.

Bailey resident and daycare parent Charles Hoogstraten presented to Council the proposals from the Bailey Parents’ Working Group. Hoogstraten calls it a "viable transition and business plan demonstrating that child care in the Bailey Community Center can be revitalized as an independent, high-quality, financially stable operation." He and others who presented during Public Comment told City Council that the Bailey Community Center is the “anchor” of the neighborhood and that closing the center could cause grave danger and add blight there of the kind now present at the western end of downtown.

Several members of Council were seemingly intrigued by the proposal, which appears to mitigate the financial stress Staff has been concerned about and provide a survival strategy for the community center. Hoogstraten told me today, "I thought Council asked some thoughtful questions that showed that they were really engaged in evaluating our arguments. I was pleased."

Konrad Hittner appeared as Chair of the Bailey Community Association to tell Council that the Association has formally endorsed the Working Group’s efforts. During discussion of the matter at Council, several citizen presenters and Councilmember Ruth Beier raised the question of why the City seems able to cover so many other “unforeseen” large expenses but does not have the funds to help the daycare and community center survive until sustainable solutions are found.

Sally Silver, long-time advocate of the Bailey neighborhood, was at Council last night and observed today via email, “The parents' group has done an extraordinary job of creating a plan to salvage the daycare operation and meet the objections of the staff (expense and repairs) that caused the staff to seek to close the program. This sort of citizens' initiative should be encouraged and supported by the council, even if the effort were to eventually fail. [Citizen Roy Saper’s] presentation made it clear that the city has the funds to do this, and has even allocated funds for some repairs to the [Bailey Community Center] that the staff (for what reason?), has failed to spend.”

Silver added, “How many people would devote so much time and energy to an enterprise such as this and not simply have moved their kids to another daycare program? Probably zero.”

In his presentation to Council, Hoogstraten said that one possibility for the future of the daycare is having the program run by EC3, a private, nonprofit, high-quality childcare organization based in Lansing. But during the discussion, Mayor Nathan Triplett said he was in receipt of a letter from the Director of EC3 saying that the group was not in receipt of a proposal from the Bailey parents and that they are “disinclined to accept such a proposal.”

Triplett asked Hoogstraten for clarification, and the reply came from Hoogstraten that important material was sent to EC3 after EC3’s letter went to Council.

Today I asked Elizabeth Weston, EC3’s Executive Director, to explain. She did:

“In my January 12th e-mail to Mayor Triplett, I maintained that EC3 would not review or consider any proposal from the Bailey parent group unless or until the East Lansing City Council approved the parent group's plan.” Thus it would appear that EC3 is waiting for City Council to signal support.

Weston added, “I also conveyed my personal disinclination to recommend that my Board accept such a proposal because it would invite a substantial risk to EC3's current service to its constituent families, especially given the reluctance of the Bailey parents to accept EC3's pricing and policies,” but, she noted, this was prior to getting the results from a survey of Bailey daycare parents that Hoogstraten says resulted in 97% of those responding saying they would accept EC3’s pricing and policies.

Hoogstraten told Council that even if EC3 won’t run the daycare, EC3 will provide support to a parents’ group setting up an administration system independent of the City but located in the Community Center.

EC3's Director Weston tells me, “I confirm that EC3 will continue to provide technical assistance to the parent-run program if it is allowed to proceed. EC3 is a parent cooperative nonprofit, and one of our founding principles is to serve as a model for other high-quality early learning centers.”

Hoogstraten told me today, "I think Council is closely divided on the question, but we continue to hope that our demonstration of financial viability will allay many of their understandable concerns."

As with all business before Council, those wishing to weigh in on this matter can attend Council next Tuesday at 7 pm and speak during public comment, and can also write to East Lansing’s City Council at council@cityofeastlansing.com.

UPDATE: Former Mayor Urges City Council to Save Bailey Daycare

CORRECTION, January 14, 3:40 pm: The spelling of Elizabeth Weston's name has been corrected, and Roy Saper is no longer identified as a resident of Bailey. (He lives in Whitehills.)

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