THE HIGH PRICE OF OVERREGULATION: A look at the regulatory burden on Colorado childcare providers.

While the problem childcare operators face might not be new, I can tell you something that is: regulatory bloat. Since CDEC officially began in 2022, the agency added 27 new rules and regulations to the state’s already voluminous rulebook. By this point, the page count is up in the 500’s. From a purely pragmatic point of view, who can manage this complexity? How on earth are they supposed to do so fairly?

As things stand now, CDEC contracts with several agencies and nonprofits around the state to do their regulatory compliance and licensing checks. Per a CDEC spokesperson, this list has included Goodwill of Colorado, The Institute for Racial Equity and Excellence, Mesa County Public Health, and Red Rocks Community College.

Dawn Alexander of the Early Childhood Education Association of Colorado, a trade group, used to work for Red Rocks Community College as one of their inspectors. She told me that her training was partially done by the state, but Red Rocks did the bulk of it, with a few months of job shadowing (with her first following, then leading). Another contractor, who didn’t want to go on record, told me of a similar process; the state providing some training, with additional in-house training/mentoring prior to hitting the field alone.

Ms. Alexander, as well as the other contractor, also told me about meetings designed to make sure rules were consistently applied across the state and within an organization. This varied from a monthly in-house meeting in one case to a giant, virtual free for all in another.

In the grand tradition of rulemaking bodies, CDEC also puts out what they term administrative guides which don’t hold the legal force of rules, but they are intended to help inspectors and providers to understand and apply the rules in a consistent manner. I pawed through them too quickly to count pages, but I doubt they’d be much less than the rules themselves.

The likely “solution” will involve more subsidies. And with subsidies come… more regulations.