Of Paso Robles’ 88 licensed child care facilities, the city has the capacity to serve 1,612 children under the age of 12, which isn’t enough to support its growing workforce, according to the City Council.
To fill this gap, the city joined forces with the Community Action Partnership of San Luis Obispo County (CAPSLO) and launched a study to explore the city’s options for expanding child care services to better support working families and ultimately improve the local economy.
Shana Paulson, the director of CAPSLO’s Child Care Resource Connection, said this study is the first of its kind in the county.
Under this division of CAPSLO, Paulson said they track data on local child care facilities—what the programs are, where they are located, descriptions of them, and what they charge—and typically they use the data to connect interested families with a facility that works best for them. Now, CAPSLO can use the same data to conduct surveys for licensed child care facilities to identify what’s missing and suggest ways to improve.
“It allows us to have that deeper curiosity about specific communities and trends that we’re able to see,” Paulson said. “We’re already getting responses, and we’re even seeing that some people are interested in maybe expanding the hours of care. So, we’ll be having our team connect with them directly and talk about what that might look like and what things they might do differently—how they might need to adjust policies or practices. … So, those are the conversations we’re really looking forward to. We haven’t had it in this structured way.”
Paulson said the primary issues within child care are price and availability, issues that aren’t exclusive to Paso Robles but are found throughout the whole state.
According to the California Child Care Resource and Referral Network, working households with two children spent at least 24 percent of their income on child care in 2023.
“And then, of course, it’s even more for our lower income families,” Paulson said.
According to Paulson, child care is only available to 32 percent of Paso Robles’ working parents.
“It’s always important to grow choices, right?” Paulson said. “So, we’re going to continue our work to start new child care businesses, but this study is really looking at what’s going on in the existing provider population. We have an established, experienced cohort, and would they be interested in doing more? Or maybe we’ll find that there are some barriers we hadn’t noticed.”
Paso Robles Mayor John Hamon told New Times the city is eager to improve its child care services so it can further expand its local workforce and economy.
“We know that there’s problems in the wine and hospitality industries with the workers having to deal with child care. They can’t have quality child care, they can’t work—bottom line,” Hamon said. “It’s trying to provide some way to have a stable environment where they can count on child care providers.”
Hamon said it’s the city’s responsibility to bring dollars back to the region, and in turn that requires supporting the children of the workforce bringing in those dollars. This could look like allocating additional funding toward care, or filing more applications for state and federal funding, he said.
“I don’t think it’s one city’s responsibility; I think it’s the whole region. The young families that are coming here need support, and in today’s economy, it’s almost impossible for them to do it on their own,” Hamon said. “Plus, we also have to have those workers to do the work that needs to be done, right? So, if we don’t have the supply of good workers, then our economy is stagnating as well. It’s definitely a cart before the horse thing.”
The results of the study will be presented to the City Council this fall, and it will determine next steps. Δ
This article appears in Pride 2025.