Gov. candidate Tobias Read makes Bend stop to hear child care ideas

Published 4:01 pm Monday, March 21, 2022

Tobias Read, Oregon’s state treasurer and a candidate for governor, center, talks about child care issues at The Haven Coworking space Monday in Bend.

Tobias Read, state treasurer and Democratic candidate for governor, met in Bend on Monday with a handful of local child care industry leaders for a listening session on the region and state’s shortage of available and affordable care.

Education, including child care, is one of the top issues Read has heard Oregonians concerned about on the campaign trail, he told the group.

Most Popular

“It’s confusing, it’s inconsistent, it’s not effective, it’s expensive, it’s stressful, it’s all of those things,” Read said of the state’s child care system. “It’s one of the big three right now, and I think it is the one that probably has the most lasting power as an issue and people feel most consistently, I think.”

Members of the group, including representatives from local after-school programs, the Bend Chamber of Commerce and Oregon State University-Cascades, peppered Read with their thoughts about the issues parents and child care providers face and ideas they hoped to see advanced by Oregon’s next governor.

“I think we should be really ambitious in saying, this is our future, and be really focused on that, and having the metrics to go with it,” Read said. “We should discard the fact that ‘that’s not my kid’ — they’re all our kids — to get to the place where we recognize that we’ve all got a stake in kids’ success. That would be success in itself.”

Read’s campaign has already committed to supporting universal free pre-kindergarten for children statewide and lowering the cost to families using the state’s low-income subsidy program.

The candidate, who jotted on a notepad throughout the conversation, said he took away a number of ideas from the group.

“The big takeaway for me was the practical approach that people are taking here,” Read said. “There’s a lot of good ideas and a lot of people with different points of view who are already collaborating.”

He highlighted an idea pitched by the group to split child care workers across multiple employers — in other words, combining multiple part-time jobs, like one at the Boys and Girls Club after-school program and another at a day care center, to create a 40-hour week that would pay workers enough to live.

As the group discussed what the role of workplaces should be in their employees’ access to child care, Read pointed to OregonSaves, a retirement savings program the state treasury instituted under his leadership and the country’s first such program.

The program is an example of an effective partnership between employers and the government that might be a useful model for funding child care, he said.

And the candidate said the state needs to take a high-level look at the process of starting and licensing child care operations, a multi-step process which involves a handful of separate government agencies that work on different timelines and with different rules and regulations.

Read has positioned himself as something of a non-establishment candidate throughout the race for the Democratic nomination, and said the ability to look at a system as a whole is an important quality for a governor to have.

“The willingness to question what we’re doing now, to say, clearly, ‘the status quo is not working for people,’ that’s an important starting point,” Read said. “What works well is when we stick at the implementation.”

Read, who represented his Beaverton district in the state House of Representatives for a decade before being elected treasurer in 2016, used that point as an opportunity to differentiate himself from his most prominent primary competition in the race, former Rep. Tina Kotek, D-Portland, the state’s longest-serving speaker of the house. Read argued he’s better equipped to be governor, having led a state agency rather than just serving in the Legislature.

Read was in Bend mainly to visit family, but scheduled a few campaign stops as well, including the child care listening session and a meeting with leaders from OSU-Cascades later on Monday.

Marketplace