A set of Michigan bills aimed at lowering the cost of child care received a hearing Tuesday before the state Senate Housing and Human Services Committee.
The bills would ease regulations and codify the Tri-Share program, in which the state and employers help families pay for child care, into law. They would also give child care centers more options for recourse if they’re accused of violating a rule.
Committee chair Senator Jeff Irwin (D-Ann Arbor) said there's broad agreement among people who provide and rely on child care that lawmakers need to do something about access.
“I heard testimony today from providers, I heard it from employers, we heard from families who are all saying, ‘We have a crisis in child care.’ And if we don’t attend to the needs of these providers, we’re going to see real problems for families who need this service in order to survive in today’s economy,” Irwin told reporters after the meeting.
During testimony, speakers described a dire situation where child care itself is too expensive, there aren’t enough providers available, and the ones who do exist can’t afford to pay their employees enough to keep them on staff.
Some 2,500 child care providers in Michigan are getting stipends to boost their wages by $200 to $300 a month through a pilot program using state funds, but it's set to end in September 2027. Supporters of the legislation that was under discussion Tuesday argue more funding and consistency from the state could help the situation.
Right now, the state pays providers to offer cheaper child care to some lower-income families through its Child Development and Care Program. The bills would tie those reimbursement rates to the pace of inflation as a way to keep rates from falling behind.
Madeline Elliott is a policy and program associate with the group Michigan’s Children.
“It’s tough for child care programs to accept the child care scholarship because rates are so low. Rates in Michigan, for the child care scholarship, haven’t risen since October of 2024, so a year and a half. And inflation has increased by 2.7% in that time,” Elliott said during testimony.
She said because of the current cost burden, many providers don’t participate in the child care program, meaning some of the families most in need don’t have that option.
Another part of the package would look at supporting small-scale child care options by letting small providers watch kids outside of their home, but with similar regulations as if they were in-home. The bill sponsors said that would help in cases where people could otherwise be running an in-home center but found a different location to use, like a church.
Patricia Soutas-Little worked on a pilot program in Northern Michigan. She said taking it statewide could address child care shortages.
“It provides one more way to bridge that child care gap,” she said Tuesday.
Many providers of child care testified in support of the bills, but support was not uniform.
Kalamazoo-area provider Tambra Craven said those smaller centers, known as microcenters, shouldn’t get special treatment.
“Call me old school, but after 32 years, a center is a center,” Craven said.
Lawmakers said they’d look at some technical fixes to the bills to address some concerns around awkward wording and definitions. It’s unclear what possible substantive changes could come before the bills get a committee vote.
Similar bills passed the Senate last term but died in the House of Representatives.
