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Follow daycare debate tonight at Northernlife.ca

Northernlife.ca will carry live coverage tonight when city council again debates the fate of the Junior Citizens Day Care centre, something they have done several times since December 2012, when closing the city-owned facility was first discussed.
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The Junior Citizens Day Care is located in the YMCA building downtown. The city is considering creating a waiting list for subsidized care, as part of cost-cutting measures to make up for a cut in provincial transfers. File photo.
Northernlife.ca will carry live coverage tonight when city council again debates the fate of the Junior Citizens Day Care centre, something they have done several times since December 2012, when closing the city-owned facility was first discussed.

Tuesday's motion, put forward by Ward 6 Coun. René Lapierre, would postpone the closure of Junior Citizens until a “detailed cost analysis, including the total number of city employees affected, the costs associated with bumping rights and severance pay, as well as an analysis of the impact on the wait list and late night French language spaces,” is presented to council for review at its meeting May 12.

First opened in 1972, the centre initially catered to special needs children. It became a full daycare in 1977, operated side-by-side with a Francophone daycare. Unlike most daycare facilities in Sudbury, Junior Citizens is open until midnight, and offers bilingual services so it can accommodate more families.

The centre's 20 staff are municipal employees and make about twice the salary than workers in private-sector day cares. As a result, staff subsidies at Junior Citizens were $6,304 per child in 2013, compared to $3,063 for non-city facilities.

Junior Citizens moved into the new YMCA building in 2000, and has a lease that expires this year to rent 6,000 square feet of space. The daycare's employees received layoff notices in February. It's scheduled to close June 30.

The move to close the daycare began after budget deliberations in 2012. In January 2013, the city's operating committee delayed a decision while staff looked for ways to reduce the $129,000 the facility costs taxpayers each year. Council voted to close it last August.

The need to cut costs was the result of provincial funding cuts for day care. The cuts totalled $1.8 million in 2013, and a staff report said another $3.6 million is expected to be cut by 2016.

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