The Brief

In 2021, the city of Los Angeles took some of its COVID-19 relief money and put it toward a big plan: expanding and running its own childcare centers.

The City Council approved $20 million dollars of American Rescue Plan Act federal funds to renovate and reopen 10 licensed preschools at Recreation and Parks facilities. It highlighted a persistent problem that became all the more acute during the pandemic: There is not enough licensed childcare in Los Angeles. The plan, according to the City Council, was to expand options for working families in low-income neighborhoods.

Fast forward four years and the city says it doesn't have the money to continue operating the majority of its preschools and is looking for new providers to take them over.

Along the way, the city missed its deadlines to reopen the centers, had more vacancies than seats filled, and never charged for the programs, despite city officials saying they never intended to run them for free. The city received a state grant to provide care for low-income children ages 2 to 3, but city staffers said they couldn't actually use the funding at the new preschools because they weren't open enough hours in the day.

Two of the centers never reopened at all.

Now, parents say they've spent months trying to get answers from the city, and the responses have only made them angrier.

 "It's an epic failure," said Lisa Shaughnessy, whose son attends one of the preschools. "They just blew through the money, didn't budget for anything, didn't plan for anything, and when they ran out of money, they said, 'Oh, sorry, program's gone.'"

The city says it has around $750,000 left to keep running the centers. After that, what remains is laid out in the city's 2025-26 proposed budget, which sets aside $1.62 million for continuing care at the remaining city-run preschools.

That represents just a tiny fraction of the Recreation and Parks Department's proposed budget: under 0.5%. Compared to the city's total budget, the number is just 0.01%.

The rapid expansion and contraction of funds has led some to wonder why the city moved forward with reopening its child care centers, and if there was a long-term plan at all.

" It's really a bad idea to use one-time money for ongoing services," said Kay Hartman, a member of the Neighborhood Council Budget Advocates. "Because it will always get you into budget trouble."

Others pointed out that American Rescue Plan Act dollars were short-term, emergency funds for a time of unprecedented crisis. The federal government poured more money into the childcare sector than the U.S. had seen since World War II. But it was never intended to be a long-term solution for endemic problems like lack of access to affordable child care.

" We knew that it was never going to be funding that would be transformational for the system,” said Arabella Bloom with the Center for the Study of Child Care Employment. "It was very much kind of a Band-Aid to protect the sector during this really stressful time."

In an email, a spokesperson for Rec and Parks said the city had used the federal funds to successfully renovate nine preschools and re-open eight of them. She pointed to rising operational costs and budget constraints as the reason city services couldn't continue.

"The city remains committed to ensuring that working families have access to safe, affordable, and high-quality childcare at these facilities by partnering with qualified early education service providers," she said.

Preschool openings were repeatedly delayed

The 10 centers that L.A. chose to reopen during the pandemic had been city-run preschools before, but they shuttered during the Great Recession. After 2008, Recreation and Parks ran just two preschool programs.

The city's goal was to renovate some of the previously closed spaces and make them operational again by July 2023, according to a 2022 report from the city administrative officer, which oversees the management of COVID-19 federal funds.

The city missed that deadline. As of June 2023, the city had opened just two of the 10 locations. More than 260 families had filled out forms expressing interest in the programs, and 100 had submitted applications. But the preschools were serving just 16 children.

"Due to construction delays and challenges onboarding resources, the number of children intended to have been served by this point is below performance goals," the report from the city administrative officer reads. A Recreation and Parks spokesperson also said licensing the preschools led to delays.

That report laid out a new intended date for the preschools to be fully operational and licensed: April 2024. Yet another report published three months after that April date found that four of the 10 preschools still weren't open. Just 29% of the seats at the centers that had reopened were full — 79 out of 272 seats. The city had received more than 750 interest forms from families looking for child care.

That same report laid out a new timeline for opening all the preschools: 2025. In the same document, the city named two dates: January 2025 and June 2025. Two of the centers — Banning Child Care Center and Van Ness Child Care Center — are still not open. And they're not opening anytime soon: Representatives with L.A.'s Recreation and Parks Department say they'll soon begin the search for non-city providers to run eight of the preschools, including the two that never re-opened.

" The department does not have funding to continue operating and maintaining the centers that we opened back up," said Chinyere Stoneham, an assistant general manager for Recreation and Parks who has overseen the child care centers for about a year.

The city has repeatedly told parents at the affected centers that there will be a "smooth transition" for families with children at the preschool, but the timeline they've presented tells a different story.

The mayor's office told LAist that federal funds for the childcare centers will be fully used up by late fall 2025. In meetings with parents and childcare providers, other city officials said that the process of finding and contracting outside providers for the newly renovated facilities will take until at least January 2026 to complete. The new entities will also need to obtain licenses from the state of California, a process that can take months.

So on a recent call for childcare operators interested in moving into the centers, one city representative said what had until then been only hinted at: The transition means that the centers would need to temporarily close.

"We have a meeting scheduled with Community Care Licensing to discuss the details of the transition and explore ways to minimize disruption to childcare services," a spokesperson for Rec and Parks said in an email.

Some parents with kids at the centers say this means they have to look for new preschool options on short notice.

" The communication has been exceptionally disappointing," said Catherine Gillespie-Vargas, whose 3-year-old attends one of the centers. "Most parents have had to make decisions on where their child is going for the next academic year. Like the timeline has passed."

At a recent parent meeting at Evergreen Child Care Center in Boyle Heights, Recreation and Parks employee LaShon Tillie-Jones, who manages the child care program, responded to parent concerns.

"I was so excited to look at these beautiful centers that opened up. We wanted this to succeed, but with budget cuts we just can't do it. I apologize for that," she said. "We probably should have provided information earlier on.”

What happened?

It's unclear if the city ever intended to keep running all the preschools it invested in long-term. The majority of federal funds went into renovating the buildings, not running the actual programs. But from the beginning, city officials said the city centers faced issues with staffing. Tillie-Jones, who manages the child care program, said the centers were never staffed to capacity, due to struggles with recruitment.

Rose Watson, a spokesperson for Recreation and Parks, said that the city wasn't able to use a grant from the California Department of Social Services because it required the centers to operate between 7 a.m. and 6 p.m.

"The funding has not been utilized at the eight sites due to the inability to hire the appropriate number of staff to expand out the hours of operation and keep the required supervision ratios," Watson said in an email.

She said grant funding has been used to support families at the city's two long-standing preschools.

Arabella Bloom with the Berkeley research center said the staffing issues mirror broader trends in the child care industry, which struggles to recruit and maintain staff due to low wages.

Echo Park Child Care Center

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Ross Brenneman

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LAist

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" This example demonstrates pretty clearly that we can't grow the supply of childcare without growing the childcare workforce," she said. "A lot of times, programs might have an empty classroom just sitting there where they could serve however many more kids, but they don't have a teacher to fill that slot."

According to the budget blue book, child care associates working for the city make between $41,843 and $62,911 a year. At the low end, that's around $20 an hour.

Staffing issues weren't the only hiccup. The city also didn't charge for its new programs, so all families were attending for free regardless of income. Multiple parents told LAist they would have paid for the service if it made the programs sustainable.

Even the city's website represents the aspirational version of the centers rather than the reality. It lists opening hours for all the centers as 7 a.m. to 6 p.m., even though multiple centers keep shorter hours.

The programs never had the chance to reach full hours or capacity. By last year, the plan to remove the new preschools from city control was already in motion. Mayor Karen Bass directed the Recreation and Parks Department to make a plan to transition the childcare operations to non-city providers, including a timeline and cost comparisons. More than a year later, that report has still not been produced.

What will the new providers look like?

Recreation and Parks staff say that transitioning the preschools to non-city providers will allow the city spaces to continue providing child care to Angelenos. Some parents expressed skepticism about the plan.

" They laid out all the problems they've had and why it was so difficult to operate, and now they just expect us to believe that a third party will come in and not have any of those problems?" Shaughnessy said.

Recreation and Parks officials said the city won't charge rent at the facilities to help providers keep costs down, and will require whoever operates the facilities to charge below market rate for tuition and fees. It's unclear if that means they'll be affordable.

One example of how the programs may look after the transition is the Joy Picus Child Development Center, a privately run program in L.A.'s City Hall. It charges $1,372 a month for preschool-aged children, with a slight discount for city employees.

City staff also said at one parent meeting that they'll start charging at the new centers that will remain under city control — $300 a week, or $1,200 a month, with considerations based on income. For comparison, the Los Angeles Unified School District's early education centers charge a maximum of around $500 a month. An LAUSD spokesperson said they were unaware of the city's preschool programs and the plan to close them until reading about it in the news.

A lost opportunity

As the end of the city's free childcare programs looms, parents who still have kids there say the programs represent a lost opportunity for Los Angeles. Multiple families told LAist that they loved the preschools, adored the city staff there and felt proud to be bringing their children to a successful city program.

"We all found a gem of a preschool," said Lucia Fabio, who has a child at one of the childcare centers. " This is working and it's working well."

Last year, the city surveyed around half of the parents at the preschools, and 100% said they were satisfied or very satisfied with the program quality.

"We missed the chance as a city to do something that almost no one else is doing," said parent Xavier Vargas. "There's this social acknowledgement [that] this is a fundamental core right. That if people want to work, they have a place to be able to afford child care. And we just dropped it."

This story first appeared on The LA Local.

Since 1977, Richard Santillan has been to every Opening Day game at Dodger Stadium. 

“The tradition goes from my father, to me, to my children and grandchildren. Some of my best memories are with my father and children here at Dodger Stadium,” Santillan told The LA Local, smiling under the shade of palm trees near the entrance to the ballpark Wednesday morning. He was there to protest the team less than 24 hours before Opening Day.

Santillan, like countless other loyal Dodgers fans, is grappling with his fan identity over the team’s decision to accept an invitation to the White House and owner Mark Walter’s ties to ICE detention facilities.

More than 30 people joined Santillan on Wednesday morning for a press conference held near 1000 Vin Scully Drive to convey a message directly to the team. 

“We are demanding the Dodgers stop participating in funding of inhumane treatment of families and do not go to the White House to celebrate with the criminal in chief,” Evelyn Escatiola told the crowd. “Together, we have the power to make a change.”

Escatiola, a former dean of East Los Angeles College and longtime community organizer, urged fans to flex their economic power by “letting the Dodgers know that we do not support repression.”

Jorge “Coqui” Rodriguez, a lifelong Dodgers fan, spoke to the crowd and called on Dodgers ownership to divest from immigration detention centers owned and operated by GEO Group and CoreCivic.

Jorge Coqui H Rodriguez speaks at a press conference outside Dodger Stadium on March 25, 2026, to demand the Dodgers not to visit the White House following their 2025 World Series win.

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J.W. Hendricks

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The LA Local

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In a phone interview a day before the protest, Rodriguez told The LA Local he did not want the Dodgers using his “cheve” or beer money to fund detention centers. 

“They can’t take our parking money, our cacahuate money, our cheve money, our Dodger Dog money and invest those funds into corporations that are imprisoning people. It’s wrong,” Rodriguez said. 

Rodriguez considers the Dodgers one of the most racially diverse teams and said the players need to support fans at a time when heightened immigration enforcement has become more common across L.A.

The team’s 2025’s visit to the White House drew ire from the largely Latino fan base, citing the Trump administration’s ongoing attacks on immigrants. 

In June, the team came under further scrutiny when rumors swirled online that federal immigration agents were using the stadium’s parking, which immigration authorities later denied in statements posted on social media accounts.

The team again came under fire after not releasing a statement on the impacts of ICE raids on its mostly Latino fan base at the height of immigration enforcement last summer. The team later agreed to invest $1 million to support families affected by immigration enforcement.

When he learned the Dodgers were pledging only $1 million to families in need, Rodriguez called the amount a  “slap in the face.” 

“These guys just bought the Lakers for billions of dollars and they give a million dollars to fight for legal services? That’s a joke,” Rodriguez said. “They need to have a moral backbone and not be investing in those companies.”

According to reporting from the Los Angeles Times, former Dodgers pitcher Clayton Kershawsaid last week that he is looking forward to the trip.

“I went when President [Joe] Biden was in office. I’m going to go when President [Donald] Trump is in office,” Kershaw said. “To me, it’s just about getting to go to the White House. You don’t get that opportunity every day, so I’m excited to go.”

The Dodgers have yet to announce when their planned visit will take place. 

Santillan sometimes laments his decision to give up his season tickets in protest of the team. His connection to the stadium and the memories he has made there with family and friends will last a lifetime, he said. On Thursday, he will uphold his tradition and be there for the first pitch of the season, but with a heavy heart.

“It’s a family tradition, but the Dodgers have a lot of work to do,” he said.

A local favorite mom-and-pop bookshop in Eagle Rock is facing displacement due to a steep rent hike. The owners say theirs is just one of several small businesses along Eagle Rock Boulevard struggling to keep up with lease increases.

Over the past 19 years, many in the neighborhood have come to love READ Books for its eclectic collection of used titles and shop dog Florence.

Co-owner Jeremy Kaplan said it’s been a delight to grow with the community over the years.

“Like seeing kids come back in, who were in grade school and now they’re in college,” Kaplan said.

But the building where Kaplan and wife Debbie rent was recently sold, and the rent increased by more than 130% to $2,805 a month, Kaplan said. He told LAist it was an increase his small business simply could not absorb.

Kaplan said he originally was given 30 days notice of the rent increase. After some research, assistance from Councilmember Ysabel Jurado’s office and some pro-bono legal help, Kaplan said he pushed back and got the 90-day notice he’s afforded by state law.

California Senate Bill 1103 requires landlords to give businesses with five or less employees 90 days’ notice for rent increases exceeding 10%, among other protections.

Systems Real Estate, the property management company, did not immediately respond to LAist’s request for comment.

What can small businesses do? 

Nadia Segura, directing attorney of the Small Business Program at pro bono legal aid non-profit Bet Tzedek said California law does not currently allow for rent control for commercial tenancies.

Outside of the protections under SB 1103, Segura said small businesses like READ Books don’t have much other recourse. And even then, commercial landlords are not required to inform their tenants of their protections under the law.

“There’s still a lot of people that don’t know about SB 1103. And then it’s very sad that they tell them they have these rent increases and within a month they have to leave,” Segura said.

She said her group is seeing steep rent hikes like this for commercial tenants across the city.

“We are seeing this even more with the World Cup coming up, the Olympics coming up. And I will say it was very sad to see that also after the wildfires,” Segura said.

Part of Bet Tzedek’s ongoing work is to advocate for small businesses, working with landlords who are increasing rents to see if they are willing to give business owners longer leases that lock in rents.

What’s next 

After READ Books posted about their situation on social media, commenters chimed in to express their outrage and love for the little shop.

While he looks for a new spot, Kaplan says he’s forming a coalition of local businesses and activist groups to see what can be done to help other small businesses facing similar displacement. He wants to address the displacement issue for businesses like his, which have made Eagle Rock the distinctive neighborhood that it is today.

Owl Talk, a longtime Eagle Rock staple selling clothing and accessories in a unit in the same building as READ Books, is facing a “more than double” rent increase, according to a post on their Instagram account.

Kaplan said he’s been in touch with the office of state Assemblywoman Jessica Caloza and wants to explore the possibility of introducing legislation to set up protections for small businesses like his, including rent-control measures or a vacancy tax for landlords. Kaplan said he also reached out to the office of state Sen. Maria Durazo.

By his count, Kaplan said there are about a dozen businesses within surrounding blocks that are at risk of closing their doors or have shuttered due to rent increases or other struggles.

When READ Books was founded during the Great Recession, Kaplan said he knew it was a longshot to open a bookstore at the same time so many were struggling to stay in business.

“It was kind of interesting to be doing something that neighborhoods needed. That was important to me growing up, that was important to my children, that was important to my wife growing up,” Kaplan said.

“And then somebody comes in and says, ‘We’re gonna over double your rent.”

Topline:

Frozen budget: Most of the city’s Bureau of Street Lighting budget comes from an assessment that people who own property illuminated by lights pay on their county property tax bill. The amount people pay depends on the kind of property they own and how much they benefit from lighting. A typical single-family home currently pays $53 annually, and in total, the assessments bring in about $45 million annually for the city to repair and maintain streetlights. Changing the amount the Bureau of Street Lighting gets from the assessment requires a vote among property owners who benefit from the lights.

Ballots: L.A. City Council’s vote gives city staff the green light to prepare and send out those ballots. Miguel Sangalang, who oversees the bureau, said at a committee meeting earlier this month that he expects to send out ballots by April 17. Notices about the ballots will be sent out prior to the ballots themselves.

Near unanimous vote: L.A. City Councilmember Monica Rodriguez was the only “No” vote Tuesday, saying she wanted to see a more current strategic plan for the bureau. Sangalang said the bureau developed a plan in 2022 that lays out how money will be spent. Councilmember Imelda Padilla was absent for the vote.

Vote count: Votes will be weighted according to the assessment amount. Basically, the more you’re asked to pay yearly to maintain streetlights, the more your vote will count. Ballots received before June 2 will be tabulated by the L.A. City Clerk.

How much more money: According to a report, the amount needed in assessments from property owners to meet the repair and maintenance needs of the city’s streetlighting in the next fiscal year is nearly $112 million.

Use of the money: Sangalang said at a March 11 committee meeting that the extra funds would be used to double the number of staff to handle repairs and procure solar streetlights, which don’t face the threat of copper wire theft. That would all potentially reduce the time it takes to repair simple fixes down to a week. Currently, city residents wait for months to see broken streetlights repaired. The assessment would come with a three-year auditing mechanism.