Photo by Rebecca Rivas | Missouri Independent)
With just two weeks to go until Election Day, Democratic candidate for Montana’s Western Congressional District Monica Tranel stopped in Kalispell on Oct. 21 to drill into solutions for child care, an issue that has emerged as one of the more pressing economic challenges for families in Montana.
Following a similar roundtable in Ravalli County, Tranel zeroed in on the district she hopes to represent in Congress as facing a substantial mismatch between family budgets and affordable child care.
She met with the Kalispell Chamber of Commerce’s child care action team as business owners and child care providers discussed the difficulties faced in the sector on the heels of a recent Department of Labor and Industry report that showed child care costs as a major impediment to the economy and workforce.
Tranel said families in the Bitterroot told her they felt stuck, and she asked the assembled group for help untangling the challenge, too.
“What would be the policy that you would advance?” Tranel asked. “What are sort of non-starters? What are the drivers that are really going to make it happen?”
Tranel is running to unseat incumbent Republican U.S. Rep. Ryan Zinke. His office did not respond to questions from the Daily Montanan about his views on the problem of affordable child care. The issues page of his campaign site addresses the economy in general but not specifically child care.
Kalispell Chamber president Lorrain Clarno said the chamber convened a task force in 2021 to complete a Child Care Study and Action Plan in response to hearing about local families’ ongoing struggles to find affordable, quality child care.
The study showed that child care centers were reporting reduced capacity and worker shortages while employers in the region were having staffing difficulties due to limited options for potential employees. In response, the chamber launched a Child Care Initiative in 2023 to bolster advocacy, public outreach and education and increase capacity in the region.
“We’ve been working as a team on that now for three solid years, and the good news is we’ve increased [capacity] lots. The bad news is affordability, and it is still the primary issue.” Clarno said, characterizing it as an infrastructure issue. “Just as our roads are important for folks to get to work, without child care, they’re not coming to work.”
The Montana Department of Labor and Industry report paired the high cost of housing and low availability of child care as “challenges to the economy,” with licensed child care capacity meeting just 44% of demand in 2023. Participants at the roundtable said that they knew families that were relocating out of the region because raising a family locally has become prohibitively expensive.
“I get two reasons why people can’t accept employment if they’re a brewer or a delivery driver — a professional job within my organization — and it’s, ‘I can’t afford to live there,’ and ‘There’s no child care,’” said Gabe Mariman, owner of Bias Brewing. “We were working for several years to increase the number of child care facilities, trying to foster in-home care, to get other people that were running child care to start a second facility, and we had all these creative ideas. What I suspect has happened … is people are cutting it out of their budget.”
Monica Tranel, Democratic candidate for Montana’s western congressional district, listens during a child care roundtable in Kalispell on Oct. 21, 2024. (Micah Drew, Daily Montanan)
Tranel broke down a hypothetical budget for a family in the district based on the median annual household income of $73,300, or an after tax monthly budget of $4,600. After transportation costs, food, healthcare, insurance and a conservative $1,200 in housing costs, a family would have roughly $750 left over — but a conservative cost for child care for two kids is estimated at $1,600, leaving a substantial monthly deficit.
In addition to that $1,200 housing cost being a low estimate for the Flathead Valley, child care is also much more expensive as providers work to balance providing quality care with paying employees a competitive, livable wage.
At Flathead Childcare, Mishael Jelly said when she wrote her business plan a year ago she wanted to pay her employees at least what McDonald’s paid — around $17 an hour.
“But I could not get the price down on my child care,” Jelly said. Roughly 85% of her expenses go to wages, and a family with two toddlers pays around $2,400 a month for care.
Many child care providers brought up wages as one area of contention, with some saying workers are viewed as more akin to babysitters than early childhood development specialists. That idea, combined with low wages across the field, has also led to a shortage of providers entering the workforce.
Tagen Vine, chief development officer at Flathead Valley Community College, said the college has seen students become more reluctant to go into the field despite many incentives.
“We have scholarships, and we have space, and we have instructors, but nobody wants to go into that field to make the kind of wages that they’re going to make,” he said.
Legislative fixes
Some legislative changes in recent sessions have helped smooth over the problem — including boosting the number of children that in-home providers can care for with having a daycare license, increasing the child-to-provider ratios and changing ratios during nap times.
Clarno said the action team has looked at programs set up by other state governments to create incentives for employer-offered benefits, including a program in Kentucky that created a child care fund to match costs, essentially splitting child care expenses three ways among the state, employers and employees. It’s a program that Clarno believes could be effective here.
“Things like that will move the dime, I think, in Montana, as opposed to some of these bigger federal pieces that we hear a lot about with tax credits,” Clarno said. She added that they’ve introduced that idea to several state legislators but “at this point in time they say it would be a no-go.”
Another issue brought up with some government programs, like the state’s Best Beginnings Scholarship, is that the income limits — 185% of the federal poverty level — can be too low for local families to take advantage of, with some families missing the cut-off by less than $50, according to providers.
Tranel floated the idea of finding ways to localize the sliding scale, such as tying it to the area median income to account for the differences in areas like Flathead County and Bozeman and other parts of the state.
“To me, with that early childhood piece of it, you can save lives, right, and families,” Tranel said. “That investment, to me, is so absolutely worth it, and you can figure this out as a community.”