A Message from the Director
Welcome to the September edition of the Community Newsletter! I cannot believe how quickly this summer flew by. As we return to school after a Labor Day weekend and begin a new year of programming, I hope you have had time to relax and take advantage of the Oregon sunshine. August was another busy month, and there are a few items I wanted to highlight for you all as summer comes to a close.
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Our September Update
Agency Request Budget
All agencies are required to release an Agency Request Budget (ARB) for the 2025-27 biennium by September 1, 2024. ARBs are meant to inform the executive branch budget. Our team is working to submit ours and provide an updated webpage with more information by next week. This biennium’s ARB is more closely tied to the forecasted available revenue for next biennium. Based on what we know today, state economists project a limited budget environment for next biennium and agencies are limited to a 1% cap for any new General Fund investments. For DELC, that means a little under $6 million is available for us to propose investments for, outside of any Federal Fund requests. As a new agency, we still have a lot of foundational work to do to meet the needs of the children, families, and providers we serve. Because of this, we have focused these investments on internal operations to help us meet the Governor’s expectations around customer service. We also have some recommended investments to expand our licensing capacity using Federal Funds.
Finally, there were a few areas of priority for the Governor that were exempt from the 1% cap: housing, behavioral health, and education/early literacy. For DELC, that means the Birth Through Five Literacy Plan that was established by the legislature via HB 3198. So, in addition to our operational and licensing requests, we also have a request to promote early literacy supports through existing program infrastructure in response to community input. We have highlighted a number of additional areas that may need investment, but this is just the first phase of the budget development process. The next big milestone will be the Governor’s Recommended Budget, or GRB, which will not be a mirror image of agency ARBs. The GRB will be strengthened and informed by what agencies put forward, balanced to the December forecast (released in November). The GRB will be released on December 1, 2024, and will be the next big piece before the legislative session kicks off next year.
Separate from budget, we are working with legislative counsel to draft potential legislative concepts for technical fixes that could move forward as bills. We’ll receive drafts of those bills in late October and then work to determine whether these concepts are moving forward in the legislative session. If so, those bills would drop in January before the session kicks off. More to come!
Employment Related Day Care
During the 2024 legislative session, the legislature allocated an additional $71 million through a Special Purpose Appropriation (SPA) to ensure we are able to pay for service for the families currently enrolled in the ERDC program. Because this program had undergone so many changes in 2023, we wanted to have at least one year of data without any major policy changes to be able to model future budgetary impacts. We’re closing in on that one-year mark since taking over the program on July 1, 2023. The waitlist that went into effect in November 2023 has definitely slowed the growth of the program, although we do see some small, continued growth each month.
We are continuing to track the growth of the caseload and associated budget impacts and will prepare to make a request to the Emergency Board – also known as E-Board – in December for a portion of the SPA. This will enable us to stay within budget for the remainder of the biennium but will not allow us to take families off of the waitlist. We know the critical role that high quality, accessible child care plays in our communities and will continue to balance access to services while working within our available budget.