News story reprinted on 7/31/2006

Group raising money for a day-care facility

By Jessica Lowell
Published in the Wyoming Tribune-Eagle

CHEYENNE - It's the stealth issue of economic and community development, and people are starting to take notice.

The number of children who need day care because their parents work or go to school far outpaces the number of spaces that are available in Laramie County at any one time.

And spaces for kids who need care at untraditional times, say 7 p.m. to 9 p.m., are all but non-existent.

For about four years a coalition of people have been working to meet that need, and now the Early Education Partnership is launching a fundraising program to help build a 19,000-square-foot facility that will have space for 500 kids over a span of two shifts.

If everything falls in place the center, which will offer early care and education, will be open in about a year in the Cheyenne Business Parkway.

Arriving at the realization that how employees take care of their kids is important has been a slow process, but it now comes up in conversations about quality of life and recruiting workers to Cheyenne.

"It's an unseen but very important component to the quality of life and the quality of the workforce," Cheyenne LEADS Chief Executive Officer Randy Bruns said. LEADS is the economic development corporation for Cheyenne and Laramie County.

Several key factors make this project an important one for a growing community.

The workforce in this county is thin, and it promises to be stretched even more as more jobs come open in the community, Bruns said, and the unemployment rate is very low.

The community, as a whole, is also aging. That means that as people start retiring in droves, younger workers are going to have to be recruited to take their place, Bruns said.

"Those jobs need to be and will be filled by family-aged professional folks," he said.

"All that creates a need for a lot of day care in this county. And then push back a little from there: We talk all the time about keeping the young people here and making an environment conducive to keeping them," he said.

"The people in professional jobs are the ones who put the highest demand on quality, educational day care."

That's something that Early Education Partnership board member Ken Dugas knows well. At the accounting firm McGee, Hearne & Paiz, Dugas's duties include human resources. He's having the same problems recruiting accountants that school districts have with teachers and unions have with tradesmen - better wages and a better quality of life elsewhere lures workers away from Cheyenne and Wyoming.

"I started comparing the cost of living for communities around the West," he said. Dugas said he was shocked to find the cost of living in San Antonio, Texas, is less than in Cheyenne, thanks to the real estate prices here.

What else a community has to offer can be an important consideration for younger workers.

Professionals, however, are not the sole driver for this project.

With companies such as Sierra Trading Post and Lowes Companies operating distribution centers, the demand for day care to suit longer work schedules became an urgent need. That need is expected to only grow when the Wal-Mart distribution center opens for business next winter.

"The plan is to offer care outside traditional hours, and that's tough for some facilities to do," Bruns said, "and it's tough for in-home facilities."

While a lot of foundation work has been done over the last four or five years, the partnership is now hitting a number of important benchmarks.

Plans for the facility were unveiled in April, and now the fundraising portion for the non-profit venture is under way.

"We developed a plan for financing it and operating it," Dugas said. And it's feasible at a 65 percent occupancy rate, although considering the demand for day care in the county the center is likely to be fully occupied.

"We have space for about 500," Dugas said. "I don't think there can be a concern that we are competing with private enterprise because there is a need for about 3,000 or 3,200 spaces to be filled."

One of the hardest parts of planning was to factor in allowing parents to pay only for what they need. Dugas said young children can be dropped off for a couple of hours or the whole day.

On Tuesday, a delegation from the partnership gave a presentation to the Cheyenne-Laramie County Economic Development Joint Powers Board seeking a grant to pay for part of the estimated project cost of $5.2 million.

The partnership, which includes educators and representatives from both private and government enterprises in the city, has secured nearly $2 million in pledges and plans to apply for both federal Community Development Block Grant funds and state Business Ready Community funds.

The Economic Development Joint Powers Board is expected to decide on the grant request at its July meeting.