Saint Paul’s question 1 is a funding levy, but it is not a funding levy for the school district. Here’s the question:

City Question 1 (St. Paul)
Should the city levy taxes to provide early learning subsidies?

In order to create a dedicated fund for children’s early care and education to be administered by a City department or office that provides subsidies to families and providers so that early care and education is no cost to low-income families and available on a sliding scale to other families, and so as to increase the number of child care slots and support the child care workforce, shall the City of Saint Paul be authorized to levy property taxes in the amount of $2,000,000 in the first year, to increase by the same amount each year following for the next nine years ($4,000,000 of property taxes levied in year two, $6,000,000 in year three, $8,000,000 in year four and so on until $20,000,000 of property taxes are levied in year ten)? BY VOTING “YES” ON THIS BALLOT QUESTION, YOU ARE VOTING FOR A PROPERTY TAX INCREASE.

So okay, let me start with a bunch of links to resources and commentary I looked at on this.

The “vote yes” website that makes the case. They have a FAQ page that is not actually a FAQ. Here is a PDF of the whole plan.

Mayor Carter is against this, and here’s a video of him explaining why. The basic explanation for his opposition is that this levy would raise $2 million the first year, $20 million in year ten, for what he thinks would be at least a $120 million program. Mitra Jalali is also opposed to it.

Council Rep Rebecca Noecker is one of the major advocates for it, and she says that while it wouldn’t cover child care costs for everyone, it would at least cover costs for the poorest St. Paul residents. Here she is explaining that to reporters in that same Twitter thread. Noecker frames it as a $39 million gap. Here is Noecker’s response to concerns about whether this money will be used on low-quality childcare, despite its framing as an “early learning” subsidy. The other strong supporters on the council of this levy are Nelsie Yang and HwaJeong Kim.

The Saint Paul Federation of Educators (the teacher’s union) opposes this levy: “Should this substantial levy pass, it would require Saint Paul tax payers to fund yet another voucher program, moving more public dollars to private and for-profit child care providers with no plan; no systems for accountability, without creating additional child care slots, and without supporting the many small, independent, and in-home providers that serve our Saint Paul families.” ISAIAH, which is a progressive organization in the state, has opted to take no position on this, either for or against. Two Pioneer Press articles about arguments for and against it, and groups for and against it, are available without a paywall here and here.

There’s an interesting discussion of the proposal on Reddit where several people ask what sort of oversight this would have that would prevent outright scamming of the program as happened with Feeding Our Future. I think the best answer to this is on page 14 of the plan, which shows the structure of the actual city office that would be added. Under the Office of Financial Empowerment, which also runs the College Bound program that was added a few years ago, the city would add an Early Childhood Program Manager, who would oversee a Program Outreach and Customer Service Coordinator and a Program Data and Evaluation Coordinator. I assume this is where oversight would come from. (Here’s the most common problem I foresee: you can’t use it to pay a relative to take care of your kids, as I understand it, so I predict that people will arrange trades with friends. Your mom will pretend she’s taking are of your friend’s kid, and your friend’s mom will pretend she’s taking care of your kid, but actually the grandmas will all care for their own grandkids. And someone will get busted eventually and the County Attorney will have to charge a couple of old ladies from desperately poor families with benefits fraud.)

One really basic question I always have about a levy vote is, what’s the cost for my house? If the FAQ page were actually a FAQ and were actually addressing frequent questions, it would have that. (I promise you, “how much will this cost me” is a frequently asked question about literally any levy vote.) Instead, what it says is, “The average home will pay an additional $16.00 in the first year, less than $2 a month. After the 10th year, when the program is fully funded, the average home will pay $160.00 each year.” It does not tell you what an “average home” is, but this CBS News piece clarifies that “For the median home priced at $275,300, the increase is $15.91 per household for 2025 until it reaches about $160 annually ten years later.”

So: for year one, it’s $1.45 for each $25,000 in value. For year ten, it’s $14.50 for every $25,000 in value. I would have appreciated a chart, but whatever. If you own a $300,000 house, it’s $17 the first year, $170 in the tenth. If you own a $500,000 home, it’s $29 the first year, $290 the tenth. If you own a $2 million mansion on Summit Ave, it’s $116 the first year, $1,160 in the tenth. Which I gotta say, if you own that kind of house, you can probably afford. (This is assuming I did the math right, which is a big assumption. This is why people should give me a chart on the advocacy website.)

That’s not in fact a lot of money. Kind of the best case for this is, “it’s really not a lot of money, and would probably help some people who could genuinely use some help.”

So … here are my concerns. This plan does absolutely nothing to address the existing shortage of day care spots (especially for infants, and the plan rolls out to infants!) and it explicitly acknowledges that it does nothing to bring up day care provider wages, which are terrible, and a big part of why there’s a shortage.

One of the fundamental problems with day care in the US is that it’s both unaffordable to parents who need it, and yet also does not pay the workers enough to live on. This has been a problem for decades, but the overall labor shortage post-pandemic resulted in a whole lot of people just moving into more lucrative work (and by “more lucrative work” I mean “almost anything else,” you can probably make more money in retail than working at a day care center.)

When I started researching this I heard that Warren, Minnesota had done a city-based day care subsidy program and so I looked up what they’d done. Here’s the article I found. Warren is small, and had only a single day care center, which was in danger of closing because they couldn’t make ends meet. The center was taken over by the city, is run as a nonprofit, and subsidized by a small sales tax passed by residents. The day care workers are paid $17/hour with benefits (I went looking and found their want ad on Facebook pretty quickly), which is much better money when you’re in a small town with significantly cheaper housing.

The plan has some vague statements about “partnerships” that might be their gesture in the direction of adding day care availability. (I’m not sure.) They address compensation directly: “Many of the current programs designed to support ECE providers do not provide increased wages. Instead, these programs offer to offset costs of programing with the expectation that paying for supplies (etc.) with a grant liberates other funds to be used for employee wages. In reality this is not a practical solution for long-term compensation challenges. ECE providers remain underpaid. The Program budget does not address workforce compensation, instead workforce initiatives would focus primarily on education and training.”

Other concerns I have (some of these might be addressed somewhere, but I haven’t found the answers):

• How does reimbursement work from the provider perspective? Like — let’s say you’re a deeply affordable home day care provider doing care for a couple of neighbors. One of the “legal, non-licensed” people, which means you follow the safety rules but aren’t following the “must do learning activities and log them in such-and-such a way” rules, I think. (I know the legal-non-licensed people have to follow safety rules because that was explained in one of the videos.) Anyway: you have a kid in your day care who’s getting the subsidy. But you realize that if you raised your rates, you’ll automatically get more money from the family or families with the subsidy. Is this likely to happen? How much will it impact the families who aren’t quite poor enough to receive the subsidy, especially given that everyone agrees it’s not even going to come close to covering all the kids in deep poverty in St. Paul?
  
• You have to send your kids to day care in St. Paul to receive the subsidy, with a handful of exceptions that include homelessness but do not include “I live in St. Paul, work in Minneapolis, and would like a day care center close to my job” nor “I could not find day care available in St. Paul.” I mean, I get that if you have a St. Paul program you want to fund St. Paul businesses but this actually feels like one of the reasons it should be a state program.
  
• Given the “day care must be in St. Paul” restriction, how much impact is this going to have on people from outside St. Paul who have a job in St. Paul and want to be able to place their kid in a day care near their workplace? What percentage of people in the metro work in a different city from the one they live in? It seems like a lot to me.
  
• If I understand it correctly, it’s the day care provider who applies to get reimbursed. Can they refuse to accept kids whose parents are not fully self-pay, and is this going to turn into the “no section 8 renters” problem but for day care?
  
• Nothing in the plan seems to acknowledge the problem that the amount of money is fixed, but prices might go up. Is the assumption that property values will increase with inflation or are we just going to pretend that this will not be a problem?

But once again, it’s not a lot of money and it would probably help some people who really need assistance. I think my biggest concern is the law of unintended consequences because this just feels like a giant, giant set of unintended consequences wrapped up in a fairly small program.

I don’t know! I keep going back and forth. I have to actually make up my mind on this before I go vote. I am leaning towards voting no, but then I think about how little it would cost. When I lean toward voting yes, I think about Melvin Carter pointing out, “this would mean the city would be paying money to a private business to help it negotiate a county process” and think about what an absolute clusterfuck this seems like a recipe for.

I wish we were discussing a proposal to do something statewide! Because I feel like this is the sort of thing that should be handled by the state, not by individual cities.

ETA 10/25: Some additional thoughts and information since I posted this.

Mayor Carter is now saying that even if the levy passes, he won’t implement it. He says he doesn’t have to (the vote authorizes a levy, it does not require a levy) and that the proposal overpromises what it will do. Direct quote from Carter: “We’re asking voters if they want to buy a brand-new Corvette for 30 bucks. Like, yes, I do. I want to buy a brand-new Corvette for 30 bucks. I can’t buy a brand-new Corvette for 30 bucks.” The City Council can still vote to start collecting the tax but they cannot make Carter implement the program, apparently.

The problem Carter is talking about is very clearly on display with the mailer that I got at my house today, which shows a child with a purple crayon a la Harold and says EVIE’S BIG DAY on the front. Inside it says, “Voting YES means that children from every corner of Saint Paul will enter kindergarten ready for success, instead of some getting left behind” and “Voting YES will help support outstanding teachers like Ms. Caolina” and “Voting YES means thousands of Saint Paul children whose parents can’t afford the $15,000 per year cost of child care will now learn and grow together.” That first one is actually pretty cleverly phrased, “children from every corner of Saint Paul” which can be true even if it’s a very small number of children and yet it’s also phrased in a way to make a casual reader think it’ll cover a lot more children than it will.

I really hated this mailer. It felt patronizing and deceptive.

I did also have a phone conversation with council member Rebecca Noecker, one of the major supporters of the initiative. She said that part of the theory of change here is that when the state has dragged its feet and cities have acted, this has sometimes gotten the state to get off its butt and make the changes people want, and cited all-day K, smoking bans, and minimum wage laws as three examples. She thinks that if St. Paul implements this, it will encourage other cities to follow suit, and ultimately get the state to invest a lot more in day care subsidies and early childcare.

On the question of how this would help childcare providers and improve availability, she said that currently, state-provided early learning scholarships cover only part of the cost of day care, which means that sometimes providers eat the loss, and for the children covered by this program, it would cover the full cost (based on the average cost citywide.)

I asked how many kids they think this will cover. She said 65 to 100 in Year 1, because that’s a “pilot year” and is supposed to be a very small group, and 2,500 to 2,900 in Year 10, once it’s fully scaled up. (There are currently about 20,000 kids under 5 in St. Paul according to what I found when I googled, and the Vote Yes website thinks about half of them would qualify for this program, so it would cover about a quarter of the kids who would qualify, once fully scaled up, using Rebecca’s estimates. It looks like about 25% of the children in St. Paul are fully below the poverty line, so it would cover about half of those kids in year 10, if nothing else changed.)

She compared a city program (vs. continuing to lobby for this at the state level) to pulling drowning kids out of the water: maybe you’re building a really nice big raft, but if it’s not done yet, shouldn’t you try to pull kids out of the water where you can?

She also filled in some information I didn’t have, like she said that “legal non-licensed” is actually an incredibly small category that’s basically day cares that missed some requirement to be licensed but had gone through basically the same process. She gave an example of a day care that didn’t have quite as much outdoor space as it was supposed to, and also a day care center that didn’t qualify for licensure because it doesn’t charge (it serves families in poverty). Anyway my hypothetical about the two grandmas doing a swap: very unlikely to happen unless the grandmas fully go for licensure as in-home day cares, which probably they will not do.

In Year 1, this program would raise $2 million (yes, that is $31K – $20K per child served, because in the early years a lot of the money is going to set up the city office that will oversee it). In Year 10, this program would raise $20 million; that is $6,900 to $8,000 per child served. Childcare costs $15,000 per year according to their brochure and this program is supposed to cover the full cost, unlike early learning scholarships. I assume that the reason we’re assuming this will work is that it’s a “last dollar” program and some of these kids would also be getting early learning scholarships from the state?

Anyway, I looked up the St. Paul City Budget to see some things we currently spend $2 million on, just for comparison. I found the City Budget hard to parse because they want to break the money down more based on where it came from than on where it’s going, but I think the the mayor’s office costs about $2 million.) We currently spend about $24 million on the library system (I’ve heard lots of people point out that when fully ramped up, this would cost about as much as the library system and that’s slightly unfair), $72 million on Parks & Recreation, $134 million on cops, and $193 million on Public Works. I tried to figure out how much we spend specifically on filling potholes but I couldn’t find that as a line item and wasn’t sure where it fell.

That was a lot of additional research to come back to where I was before: I like the idea of a public subsidy for day care, but I remain torn about this particular proposal.

I do not have a Patreon or Ko-Fi but instead encourage people to donate to fundraisers I can then see fund. Usually I do teacher fundraisers (and I found one for this year, Ms. Pierce at Lucy Craft Laney school in North Minneapolis who would like donations to buy snacks for her students and supplies like Lysol wipes — stuff that schools with wealthier families just have the parents send in).

But I’m also fundraising for something slightly more personal to my family this year: YMCA Camp Northern Lights. Camp Northern Lights is a family camp, which is a camp that whole families attend together. My family went to Camp Du Nord (the other YMCA family camp) for many years, and my daughter Kiera has worked as a counselor at Camp Northern Lights for the last two summers. One of the things that makes Camp Northern Lights unique is their serious commitment to inclusion of families from communities that have been underrepresented at YMCA camps.

Last summer, Camp Northern Lights had a serious fire early in the summer — no one was hurt, but they lost their commercial kitchen and the housing for the counselors-in-training. They are hoping to raise enough money to rebuild an expanded kitchen. I have set up a fundraiser towards that goal. If you’d like to express your appreciation for the usefulness of this blog, you can show your love by donating to my fundraiser!