Worksession re AO 2026-69, amending Anchorage Municipal Code Chapter 16.55 Anchorage Child Care...

Okay, everyone, let's get this work session started. Today is Friday, May 15th, and we are noticed from 1 to 2 PM today, and this is a work session.

Number—. Here we go—. AO-202669. So that is an ordinance changing some of our— proposing to change some of our child care ordinances or code. I'm sorry.

And we have a public hearing on that that will come up on our May 26th meeting, and so we will get a briefing today from the Health Department folks, so we have them joining here, and then we will get into it. So I'll note that we do have some materials. They should be posted online as well, as well as a copy of the ordinance. So we'll start with introductions in the room and then on the phone, then we'll go to our presenters. Jared Gerker.

Anna Brawley. And that's all in the room right now. We also have Mr. Johnson on the phone. I'm here. And any other members I'm missing?

Okay, not right now, but I know we'll have at least a couple folks joining us, so why don't we go ahead and get started. So I'll turn to our Health Department folks, if you can introduce yourselves, and then we'll move through the slides you have. Thank you.

I'm Dawn Skeat, the Child Care Licensing Supervisor for the Health Department.

Kimberly Rasch, Anchorage Health Department. So good afternoon, everyone. Like Chair Brawley has mentioned, we are here today to talk about the second round of code changes to 16.55, which is our child care licensing code. I just want to touch upon a few things before Dawn launches into the presentation today. You have 4 handouts in front of you.

The first one is the presentation for today, which is called Modernizing Anchorage's Child Care Licensing Code. The next document you have is a copy of the AO. As Chair Brawley mentioned, she will be seeing this at the 26th meeting. Within this packet of the AO, you will also see two letters of support, one from the Anchorage Child Care and Early Education Fund, so the ACE Fund, as well as from THREDD. The third document here goes with the presentation today.

It's just the crosswalk between the code that we are changing and then the state regulation. It's just in a larger format. We didn't want to put it in the presentation because it is a lot of information. Thank you, and I'll just note for the record we were suddenly joined by Ms. Park, Ms. Scout, and Mr. McQuarrie in person.

Also Ms. Baldwin-Day on the phone and also our second assembly council. So just for the record, go ahead. Thank you. And then the 4th handout you have here is from the presentation that Don and I provided to the body on the first round of changes. And so if you would like to listen up on that, you can.

That work session happened on Friday, June 27th, 2025. It is on your work session site as well as the assembly approved the changes for the first round on July 15th. 2025. With that, I will turn it over to Dawn Skeet to conduct the presentation. And if you have changes, just please let us know throughout the presentation so that we can address them as we go.

Thank you.

Good afternoon, everyone.

And I think we're just getting the presentation pulled up online in the room, but it's also on our website, so, or in members' email.

And I'll note too, I will take questions throughout. So if you're on the phone, just text me to get in the queue or wave me down either way. And I guess if we have like kind of substantive discussion, again, this is a work session, we aren't debating, but we can hold time for that as well. So, all right, presentation is up. So go ahead, Tom.

All right, thank you. Today we're going to be discussing proposed updates to the Anchorage Municipal Childcare Code 1655. The presentation focuses on— focuses on referring to Round 2, as we're calling the updates. Last year we did Round 1 from this time of year through July 15th. The additional changes that are being proposed are intended to improve alignment with state regulation, reduce duplication, and modernize outdated requirements, and as well as support providers, and continue— while also continuing to maintain health and safety protections for children.

My name is Dawn Skeet, as we just did introductions, and I'm accompanied today by Director Rasch from the Health Department. We're happy to be here.

So we're— this will be a brief overview because there are some handouts that you can look at more closely that'll give a little bit more detail, but we're going to be reviewing the current child care landscape in Anchorage to include guide with an approach of guiding these updates and actions already taken that we've done so far, feedback we've received, some key takeaways, and proposed Round 2 changes with safeguards. And then Director Rasch just provided you with a summary of the documents in front of you, so that will give a little bit more overview as time allows to be able to review things.

The Municipality of Anchorage has a different licensing structure as the— in that we are the only municipality in the state that does it, that it governs and enforces child care codes. The rest of the state outside of the municipality is under the jurisdiction of the State of Alaska's Child Care Program Office, and we have jurisdiction from Peters Creek South to the Kinnik River Virgin north. And typically we have between 93 and 94 licensed child care homes in that range, in that jurisdiction. Right now we have 92, so we're kind of right on track. And we normally run between 95 and 97 centers, and right now we have 98.

So that's— I'm happy that we're up by one. We have approximately a steady, a steady number of about 8,000 licensed child care spaces within our jurisdiction, and right now I looked at exact numbers, we're at 8,069. And while overall capacities remain relatively stable, growth has somewhat been limited because we open and we'll open some and then others will close. It's whatever the functionality is of each program and their decision-making. And providers continue facing significant operational and administrative pressures to include staffing shortages, rising costs, and regulatory complexity.

And I'll just note briefly for the record, we were also joined on the phone by Mr. Martinez at 107. Thanks.

Our work on this project has been guided by 3 key principles in reducing duplication, maintaining safety above and beyond all else, and expanding access both to families and to interested applicants who want to open facilities. These principles have shaped both Round 1 and again with Round 2 updates, and we want to be really clear that the goal is never to weaken oversight or to reduce protections for children. Those those goals stay first and foremost at all times. Our goal was to reduce unnecessary barriers where municipal requirements might duplicate or exceed the state requirements without reducing safety standards.

In Round 1, there were several changes that were implemented to address immediate barriers that were identified by providers as well as by our own staff. We've— we live in this code and we're pretty familiar with what works and what doesn't work. So excuse me, there was quite a bit of input to be able to make decisions on where we could go to make change, proposed changes this time around. These changes last time included removal of licensing fees for renewals and changes. We removed the municipal requirement for liability insurance.

We increased the initial capacity of a home in the first year from 6 to 8 children at any one time. We aligned all of our state ratio— all of our ratios, caregivers to children, with state standards, and we updated some outdated facility requirements and increased operational flexibility. Those were the goals for that round one, and they seem to have worked. Many of these changes were intended to reduce the startup and operational costs while helping providers be able to maintain or even expand their services.

Roughly 6 months after the original Round 1 passed, we gathered information and feedback from both licensed homes and licensed centers. We wanted to ensure that the changes that had been implemented were providing benefit and not causing additional burdens for providers. That would have had the exact opposite effect of what we were trying to do. Several consistent themes emerged and providers reported On— we hear this a lot— they reported ongoing demand targeted at infant care, that we are grossly low on infant care in this town. Many of the responses indicated that staffing flexibility had definitely helped with passage of Round 1 last year, and at the same time, the responses also indicated that they emphasized continuing staffing shortages and operational challenges.

Staffing shortages continue to be very much a problem. We also repeatedly heard concerns regarding confusing and duplicative code language and barriers that continued to affect expansion efforts. We sent out 190 surveys and we received 32 back.

Some key takeaways based on provider feedback. Some key takeaways became clear. The demand for Childcare, especially regarding infants, remains extremely high. Most providers continue operating at or near capacity overall. Administrative flexibility remains critical in their decision-making so they can remain open and providing services.

And while Round 1 improvements helped, providers indicated that there are still some barriers that exist. Importantly, for this body to know, is even after we removed the requirement last year for liability insurance, When we asked questions, no one indicated that they had dropped their insurance. They're all voluntary, from what we could tell, the responses, they're all voluntarily maintaining it. And before we go on, I do have a question, and I guess I'll note, as somebody who remembers the discussion from last year, the insurance was a big point of debate for the— and I see folks nodding who were also in that boat. But my question is, before we move on, on this survey, I'm curious, did you see kind of a material difference in the responses or the issues between home care providers versus centers?

I imagine there's some nuance there, but just, you know, were these across the board or was it more different sets of challenges?

The questions went out and actually were— some of the questions were for both and some were targeted to homes and centers. Some of the changes that were made last year, really, other than liability and licensing fees, those impacted everybody. Capacity changes regarding ratios did not impact homes. But the increase in the first year of licensing from 6 to 8 did.

I think that some of the benefits for the— one of the benefits being proposed for this year will impact homes a lot more because it's targeted for their training. So the responses, we're going to post those online. They should be ready by the end of the day on our website. But it was hard. It was hard to tell in reading them which ones were coming from who.

There were a couple that you can tell the responses came from homes. They overall— some of the— it was hard to differentiate who was sending them in and who wasn't. They didn't really seem to have a lot of specific remarks related to a home or a center. Did that answer your question? Yeah, thank you.

And I don't have anyone in the queue right now, so please proceed.

As we elevated to the— or evaluated the next steps, several additional goals have emerged. These included further alignment with state regulation, eliminating outdated and duplicative provisions, increasing operational flexibility, and reducing administrative burdens while continuing to maintain safety standards. The goals became the foundation of our Round 2 proposals.

Round 2 was developed with 4 strategic pillars or priorities. We're working on alignment alignment, modernization, flexibility, and clarity.

These priorities provided a framework for evaluating where the municipal code could be improved while still, still preserving accountability and oversight. With alignment, we're focusing on reducing duplication between the municipal and state regulations. That's frustrating for everyone, so we're working on, on making sure that we're in alignment. With modernization, we're focusing on updating provisions and terminology so that that no longer reflect current practices and also continue to align us more with state. With flexibility, we're focusing on helping providers operate more effectively while still maintaining oversight and accountability.

And with clarity, we're focusing on making regulations easier for providers, staff, families, and the overall community to understand and for us to be able to apply consistently.

This slide summarizes several of the proposed administrative and staffing-related changes that we're proposing. Examples include removing outdated terminology in the definitions, aligning the definition— aligning definitions with state regulations, and removing the requirement that an administrator has to either live in the licensed facility or that no one lives in the facility. We're focusing on increasing flexibility for adolescent caregivers, especially as it pertains to after-school programs because they often hire high school students and modernizing training requirements to reflect current practices, including more options for online training. These provisions were originally written in many years ago and with the municipal code in 2004, they were actually passed. So we're really looking at updating these as they no longer reflect how child care programs operate today.

And the changes are intended to improve consistency and reduce unnecessary administrative burdens. Not to reduce our oversight or the safety for children.

Mr. Gookert. Yeah, thank you. I just have a really quick question on the associate administrator and caregiver aid, that language. My understanding, Director Ashton, I might just, might not be remembering this correctly, but I seem to recall a conversation last year being around trying to eliminate that, but there's language in state statute that prohibited us from doing that. Did that change, or am I— is this a different thing?

I don't know, that was a very opaquely, vaguely worded question, but I'm just off the top, off the top of the dome. I seem to recall that we were trying to do something with the associate administrator because it was quite administratively burdensome to the providers, is what the feedback I've been getting. But that the state statute required there be one. They still do. They still do require.

So this, what are we—. This is just a definition cleanup. This is just a definition. This isn't actually removed. Okay, thank you.

Thank you.

And to address that just a little bit more, the state changed their requirement for that. There used to be, it was a different name, there used to be a ratio that they had to have AAs, so many AAs per children that were present, and it was 1 to 30, and it was very burdensome. They had they had a really hard time meeting that. They had a hard time finding staff that were qualified. So the state changed that to meet the need, and now they only have to have one per facility, one AA.

So maybe that topic is maybe where it was coming from.

This next slide focuses on the health and program-related—. Sorry, Ms. Parks also had a question. Oh, I'm sorry. Thank you, through the chair.

I see the word adolescence repeated several times, and I would like to know first if you know what proportion of the caregivers in the facilities are adolescents. Overall, I don't have a number overall. There's a limit to the number they can have. Well, that— and well, actually, that's one of the things we're looking at. These are the 16 and 17-year-olds, and then there are— our code had a lot, quite a few more requirements for that age range than what the state code did, so we're trying to align more so that we can hire them in, and they— and get them onboarded easier and then trained.

But I don't have a percentage. I don't know how many there are overall. Okay. And as a follow-up, as to the insurance, how are the adolescents held for their responsibility as compared to adults? How does the insurance reflect that?

Insurance is no longer a requirement. So that really, that really would be between the facility to determine with their insurance companies. I don't, I don't have specifics on that. Thank you. Okay, no one else in the queue right now.

Okay, sorry, I didn't mean to overstep there. Um, this, this, these are the proposed changes that were regarding health and safety, and one of the things that we were talking about and would like to propose is removing annual physical requirements because this exceeds the state requirement, uh, removing duplicative nutrition requirements that are already governed in either state regulations or in the USDA standards because the nutrition— it's really well laid out what they have to do for food requirements. And then eliminating outdated provisions as it relates to a sick child center. There's a— as you'll see in your, in your AO, there's a big section in there for opening a center specifically catering to sick children. It's been in our code for many years.

We managed to go all the way through the pandemic and it has never been implemented. So it feels now like it might be a good time to remove it because we may never need it. So the intent with these is to eliminate overlap and conflicting guidance while still maintaining the state's— maintaining state and municipal health and safety standards.

With this slide, safeguards and guardrails are really important to us. That's why we come to work every day is to do what we can to protect children's safety while they're away from their parents and in child care and to reduce predictable risk of harm So we do want to make sure that while we make proposals, the idea is to reduce duplication and modernize— excuse me— modernize code language with MOA oversight and enforcement fully in place. The licensed facilities will continue to be inspected, monitored, and subject to state and MOA licensing regulations. In addition, the providers must still comply with agency requirements outside agency requirements other than licensing to include zoning, fire, and food safety. And our proposals do not remove core health and safety protections.

They're focused on reducing duplication and improving operational flexibility and clarity.

These are the resources that we have, and this is a list of the codes that we use that govern our actions.

And that's our contact information, and Darcy Montalvo is my division manager, and we can be contacted at any time with questions and comments. I had one other comment to make. In the AO, you'll also see that there is no summary, summary of economic impacts this round. The last round had about a $30,000 impact due to removal of the licensing fees, but this round there are no economic economic impacts.

Thank you. Okay, questions from members, and again, text me if you're on the phone. We can also dive into the ordinance. I know we weren't gonna go through line by line on that, but if you have questions on that as well. Mr. Gerker.

Yeah, just a quick comment. The removing the annual physicals, I think, is a really good thing. That's gonna make things a lot better. It's expensive for parents as well, and the way the timing works, you'd end up getting a physical twice a year, twice a school year, that can become quite cost prohibitive for a lot of folks, and in an industry that's already pretty expensive. So I think that's great.

I really appreciate it. Thanks. Yeah, and I'll just note we have more folks with direct recent lived experience on this body than we used to. Ms. Baldwin-Day, you're next.

Thank you, Chair. First, I just want to say how much I appreciate the fact that there's been so much give and take and communication between the health department and folks who are working in the sector. Thank you for doing that outreach and getting this sort of real-time feedback on what's working and what isn't. Just wanted to ask if it's possible in the future, if there are other surveys that are sent out, it would be really interesting, I think, to ask folks to identify in their survey responses whether they are a home operator or a center. I think it would be really illuminating to see sort of the disaggregated data or the responses and how they might differ among those two different groups, because I think we all know they have really different operations or models of operation, but similar challenges but not always the same.

So anyway, I just wanted to offer that as a possibility for future survey structure. Thanks.

Uh, thank you, uh, Member Baldwin-Day. One, the survey that was sent out did ask for the identification, um, but it seems that not everyone decided to answer that specific question. So thank you, and we will take that into consideration for future surveys as well. Any other questions?

Okay, now I don't see any on the phone, so, um, I'll do one last round if you have any questions. I know folks are flipping through the ordinance as well. Um, I guess one question I will ask just in general is, um, have you all— pending anyone else bringing amendments or other thoughts about changes— do you guys have any known issues or where you're going to produce a substitute version, or, um, at this point do you anticipate anything like that? At this point, what we have in front of us is what we have. We don't plan on bringing anything else forward.

The really, the what remains in code is our variance process, the ability for administrative hearings, but everything else really higher level, the most impactful to the community, is with our— is now state-aligned, or will be if this AO passes. One of the other things that we didn't mention but we talked about in the first round, there was a state task force on child care and they had done two sets of recommendations and one of the recommendations was looking at code and making sure that we could align with them in that we could open up more spots within our community. So really that was the first round was the most impactful for the homes and centers. And then this is just some additional cleanup of either language or ability to still increase capacity and reduce barriers.

Okay, thank you. And then I would say with any of these kind of code rewrites, they are technical. Certainly staff have deep knowledge of this. So I would say if members are interested in making amendments, obviously you're not required to talk to the staff, but it really helps to understand the implications. So I think if, as you read this and you think of ideas, definitely chat with these folks.

And often it's, there's an option to work with them on kind of amendments if it makes sense, and just generally to understand the implications of what you're proposing. So I would say that's a recommendation between now and the 26th. Yeah, and Dawn has many, many years. She's worked 25 years in childcare licensing, 22 years in child care licensing with the municipality, so she has seen everything change over the years.

Okay, well, I think last call for questions, comments, but I think otherwise we're good. So again, this will be for a public hearing on our May 26th meeting, our next regular meeting. Thank you as always to the staff for preparing this and helping us kind of understand these complex changes. So with that, we will adjourn our work session, and I believe that's our only meeting today. So thanks everyone for being here.