AUSTIN, Texas — Ninety kids and 20 employees come to Angel’s Care and Learning Center every day. It’s a space for children to learn and grow.
“Sixty percent of our children are on a subsidy from [the] Texas Workforce Commission, which means that those families are early in their career, and in almost all cases, would not be able to be in the workforce if they didn’t have access to child care. So there’s a direct economic impact,” said Chuck Cohn, the owner of Angel’s Care and Learning Center.
On Nov. 7, Texans will have the chance to vote on 14 measures that will change the Texas Constitution. Proposition 2 would allow city and county governments to give child care facilities a property tax exemption.
Cohn says the money could give staff raises.
“We’ve seen since the beginning of COVID, our starting wage has gone up about 30%,” he said.
Child care centers received financial support during the pandemic, but that funding has run out. And a bill that would have put $2.3 billion into the child care system in Texas failed during the regular session.
“Our state lege only puts enough money in to draw down the federal dollars, so the vast majority of our funding for the state is through the federal dollars,” said Kim Kofron, the senior director of education for Children at Risk, which is an advocacy organization that supports Texas kids. “So we’re not investing into child care like we could. We could be doing much more.”
Kofron says money saved on property taxes could admit children on the waitlist, hire staff and even open new centers.
“The way this bill is written, it’s really geared towards centers that are serving our low-income children. So it’s really providers that have at least 20% of their enrollment are low-income kids. So it’s not all child care centers, and it’s geared towards the families that need it the most,” Kofron said. “Child care really is this workforce behind the workforce. It’s the public good. We don’t think about it as a public good, but we kind of need to shift that narrative for it to be a public good that without it, all these other things can’t happen in our society. And so how can we support that as a business? And Prop. 2 is one way that we can potentially do that.”
Other groups such as Texans for Fiscal Responsibility don’t support the proposition. Andrew McVeigh, the group’s executive director, says he understands the sentiment of helping working families but says there’s no requirement for child care centers to pass on savings to customers.
“You’re still picking winners and losers,” McVeigh said. “And so, yes, this might help families or help the economy, perhaps. But what would probably help the economy and help families more is to reduce their overall tax burden. And not just on them if they’re homeowners, but on all businesses. So we would argue that the solution is not to cherry pick particular businesses that get these exemptions, but for the government–the state government and local governments–to reduce their spending, and thereby reduce the property tax or the overall tax burden on all Texans, which is going to help everybody in the long run.”
McVeigh added that this proposition will “inevitably” raise property taxes on other businesses and homeowners.
“Anytime you have an exemption like this, what usually happens is that local governments don’t reduce their budgets, reduce their spending in order to account for the lost revenue,” he said.
Back at the Learning Center, Cohn says Proposition 2 could relieve some hardship in the absence of state or federal help.
“I think Prop. 2 is an excellent first step to help mitigate the impact of us going off that financial cliff, where all of the government funding has pretty much gone away,” Cohn said.