Dear City Council, It deeply troubles me the lack of transparency and the missing of depth of the details Menlo Park city staff is providing the public and the council to make decisions upon. Lack of partnership: The parents have asked multiple times for what assumptions were made in forecasts and breakdown of costs to help come up with a solution for how to reopen MCC in a financially responsible way, and have not received such details. Even in the proposal published late last week, it is very unclear of what overhead is included or what administrative costs are being backed in. I would hate to think that they are inflating the costs by baking in numbers that will still be there whether or not the MCC program exists. But I know that’s what they did 2009 when the program was up for budget cuts in that recession. We would love to problem solve, many of us are willing to chip in and get creative with the programming to make it work. The center has been self sustainable in the past. I have a hard time seeing why it couldn’t be again. Inflating deficit: There has been no options of how to reduce costs either during Covid (furloughing staff) or reducing operational costs once the center reopens. For it being so clearly stated in one of the council meetings that tax payers shouldn’t pay for this program, why haven’t we reopened yet so that we can start brining in tuition, but waiting until August? And then trying to re-cooperate all the costs in a short period of time. What’s the hidden agenda? What happened to the sliding scale proposal? What happened to the need to provide affordable childcare for people who rent, who can’t afford nannies or au pairs? A 74% increase in tuition feels more of an extortion and the city washing their hands saying ”we gave the parents and option and it is THEY who turned us down”. I understand that we have to re-cooperate the costs despite the lack of action from the city’s part, but why the aggressive timeline? What is the agenda/objective that we don’t know about? Use the location for something else? Build housing there? Privatize the child care? Also troubling for me in these times are the lack of transparency and public discussion around our police department. I know they are cutting costs, but out of how big of a budget? Why were no lay-offs being proposed there? Why not even the discussion of joining the San Mateo County forces vs staying independent? There seems to be a lot of hidden agendas in Menlo Park right now, and the lack of transparency is only loosing trust in our city staff and city council. Lisa Menlo Park Residence Received on Mon Jun 08 2020 - 22:24:03 PDT