Anchorage Assembly considers removing duplicative child care licensing rules

Anchorage is making its second run in under a year at clearing local child care rules off the books — and this time the city argues some of them never did much good in the first place.

AO 2026-69, brought by the Anchorage Health Department at Mayor Suzanne LaFrance's request, would repeal four sections of the city's child care code and amend three more, effective immediately on passage. The pitch is familiar: where the state already covers the ground, the city shouldn't make providers clear the same bar twice — and easing the rules, supporters say, could help centers stay open and new ones get started amid a chronic child care shortage.

What stands out is how bluntly the department questions its own rules. It would drop the requirement that enrolled children get annual physicals, concluding the exams "have not proven effective in determining day-to-day wellness for attendance." It would scrap city nutrition rules as duplicating state and federal standards, strike obsolete First Aid/CPR ratio language now that all caregivers must be certified, and delete a 1992 sick-child provision the city says was never implemented. The amendments also end a requirement that an administrator live in a licensed in-home child care, ease rules for adolescent caregivers, and cut the mandate that three-quarters of annual training happen in person — a real loosening for centers that struggle to pull staff off the floor.

The case leans almost entirely on access. Stephanie Berglund, CEO of the statewide child care organization thread, wrote that the changes would help facilities stay open "and provide easier access for new facilities to open." The Anchorage Child Care and Early Education Fund also backed it.

The trade-off the record doesn't dwell on runs through every such measure: each rule removed is one less local standard atop the state's — streamlining to supporters, a quiet lowering of the floor to skeptics. The department says safety standards stay intact. No opposition appears in the materials, and the Assembly, which passed a first round of changes to the same chapter last July, has yet to vote.