Slow contract approval and ambitious policy targets have added friction to the first year of funding rollout for the Healthy Children’s Fund.
Frustrated child support organizations that submitted proposals are asking for faster grant distribution, but Whatcom County Health & Community Services says it is working as efficiently as it can through a complex, and novel, bureaucratic process.
In 2022, Whatcom County voters passed the Healthy Children’s Fund levy, which is expected to bring in around $10 million a year for 10 years. After building the staff and administrative capacity to take on entirely new programming, the health department started putting together requests for proposals and contracts with providers this spring.
Now, some contractors say funding negotiations and approvals are taking too long, leading the Whatcom County Council to consider a resolution to encourage timely execution of HCF contracts.
Council chair Barry Buchanan, who introduced the resolution, was careful to note it wasn’t intended as criticism of the health or finance department, but rather an attempt to streamline the system and “find the bottleneck.” After a long and sometimes heated debate on Dec. 3, the council decided to hold the resolution until January.
Members of the Child and Family Well-Being Task Force have tracked the timeline of funding and determined that, as of October, the time from award letter to executed contract has ranged from 96 to 165 days.
Generations Early Learning & Family Center in south Bellingham posted an open letter on social media in October, sharing the lengthy HCF contracting process behind the center’s new infant care room, which added eight care slots to begin to address its 100-plus waitlist. After submitting a project proposal in February, Generations did not receive contract approval for $67,000 until Oct. 28.
“We have families anxiously waiting and a full time staff member without a job until our infant room doors open,” the letter read. The infant room opened in December.
At the end of November, another potential funding recipient — a group of education and child care organizations seeking to form the Whatcom County Early Childhood Career Development Network — wrote a letter to the county council and executive urging them to help move the process forward.
Health & Community Services director Erika Lautenbach told the council during a budget presentation that the number of contracts being moved through the county is “enormous,” with limited staff capacity. Some HCF-specific staff vacancies are expected to be filled soon, and the county added two new positions to the finance office in the adopted 2025-26 budget.
With many of the HCF projects, money is going to a new contractor in a new line of business doing work the county has never contracted for before — “we’re not just buying widgets,” Lautenbach said.
Some of the contracting is complicated from a bureaucratic standpoint.
“Behind each delayed contract is a unique story — a contractor charging higher rates than the county is comfortable with, a staff error, an overly-taxed finance team, a serious legal issue with the proposed contract, a policy disagreement between my office and WCHCS, a dispute between a childcare provider and their landlord, a provider unprepared to deal with invoicing requirements,” Whatcom County Executive Satpal Sidhu wrote in an email to the county council on Dec. 12.
He asked that county elected officials prioritize their time on “meaningful, collaborative and constructive policy discussions” about implementation strategies rather than focusing on administrative issues.
In early 2023, the council approved a Year 1-2 implementation plan for HCF organization and deployment. The plan has 10 broad strategies that could be developed into a seemingly infinite number of actions for addressing child care access and vulnerable children.
Now, with 18 months of implementation under the county’s belt — and as conversations about the child care crisis and high cost of living continue — that ambitious set of strategies may need to be honed down to a more precise agenda.
“If speed and impact is a priority, then we need to target and narrow our focus,” deputy executive Kayla Schott-Bresler said during an interview on Dec. 16. “The best thing we can do is try to consolidate our priorities to really drive the impact in the community, and then the administrative efficiencies will follow from that.”
The health department website includes a HCF progress page that outlines all contracts that have been executed. As of early December, more than $5 million had been dedicated to providers and organizations, with the bulk of that going to address homelessness, behavioral health and support for low-income parents. Another $10 million is planned or in development.
| Project | Contractor | Funding |
| Infant child care | Generations Early Learning | $67,000 |
| Autism support services | Catalyst Therapies | $199,417 |
| Emergency child care vouchers | Opportunity Council | $119,305 |
| Mental and behavioral health service expansion for children and families | Brigid Collins | $452,097 |
| Ferndale School District | $271,817 | |
| Lydia Place | $474,786 | |
| Whatcom Center for Early Learning | $398,709 | |
| Internship program for counseling graduate students to serve Medicaid-eligible moms | Mobile Mama Therapy | $164,235 |
| Resources for families to avoid homelessness | Ferndale Community Services | $269,315 |
| Lydia Place | $1,155,524 | |
| Doula services for Medicaid-eligible families | Onward Love Care Collective | $34,890 |
| Birth by Design | $38,090 | |
| Drayton Harbor | $39,050 | |
| Labor of Love | $22,850 | |
| Whatcom Working Doulas | $34,050 | |
| The Very Best Doulas | $34,570 | |
| Marissa Peterson | $30,410 | |
| Sarah Day Doula Services | $21,910 | |
| Many Moons Birth | $39,450 | |
| Infant basic needs | Opportunity Council | $93,811 |
| Lydia Place | $38,500 | |
| Bellingham Food Bank | $867,688 | |
| Single entry access to services for perinatal and postpartum families | Opportunity Council | $225,000 |
Part of the reason only a small portion of the funding (around $385,000) has been put toward child care so far is that the health department was rushing to beat the end-of-the-year deadline to hand out the $13 million in federal American Rescue Plan Act funding allocated to child care capital projects, which included drop-in emergency care for families and 16 home-based child care businesses in the rural county.
“That was a huge investment,” Schott-Bresler said of the ARPA funding. “I can’t overstate how big of a success that is in terms of stretching our institutional capabilities and then the impact that it’s going to have in the community.”
Meanwhile, on Dec. 3 the county council approved a resolution to support child care subsidies for families earning up to 85% of the state median income and augmented rates for child care providers who serve infants and toddlers.
The subsidy program, one of the core features of the HCF initiative, is supposed to help local households pay less for child care while making the business of child care more sustainable for providers.
While the county is lagging behind its self-imposed timeline in spending the tax revenue from the HCF, the subsidy program alone is expected to cost more than $5 million in the first two years.
“With the implementation of that, you’ll see a massive outflow of public resources to deliver on that program,” Schott-Bresler said. “The way we’re shaping the subsidy program is that it’s supposed to have an almost universal impact within a subset of the county population.”
“Money out the door should not be our primary objective,” she added. “The primary objective should be community impact.”
With the end of the HCF Year 1-2 implementation plan looming, a team of health department staff, parents and child care providers has been meeting to develop a Year 3-4 plan. The team will work with the Child and Family Well-Being Task Force on the plan, which will be available for public review early in 2025.
Julia Tellman writes about civic issues and anything else that happens to cross her desk; contact her at juliatellman@cascadiadaily.com.
