A state bailout may help cushion a federal funding loss that threatens to drop hundreds of Fairfax County children from publicly funded day care, the governor’s spokesman said Monday.
The county had originally planned to cut some 1,700 beneficiaries of the child care subsidy by Oct. 15, but delayed the decision with the hope that the commonwealth could find funds to bridge an unexpected loss of millions of dollars.
“We’re still looking, and actually are hopeful that within the next week or two we might have a fix,” said Kevin Hall, a spokesman for Gov. Tim Kaine.
Hall would not elaborate on where the discretionary funds could be pulled from, or how much could be made available. Fairfax County is facing a cut of about $10 million for the child care program, according to a memo from County Executive Anthony Griffin.
The state funds would be temporary, Hall said, to ease the “sticker shock” from some Virginia governments — primarily Fairfax County — that benefited from the subsidy. Earlier this year, the Republican-led General Assembly shot down a series of amendments proposed by the governor that would have served the same purpose. The decision ignited a political fracas between Democratic local officials and Republican assembly members.
The ongoing debate has raised a larger question of how much the state is responsible for supplementing local child care, one that promises to resurface when the stop-gap measure runs dry.
“[Fairfax County is] probably one of the two or three richest counties in the country,” said Virginia House of Delegates Speaker William Howell. “And the fact that they’re asking the citizens of the commonwealth … to subsidize day care does seem a little incongruous to us.”
Proponents of the subsidy tout it as an effective way to reduce welfare payrolls by allowing low-income parents to work.
“This is an investment in people that will have a huge payoff for the future, as far as bringing people back into the economy as taxpayers,” said Fairfax County Board of Supervisors Chairman Gerald Connolly.
