A Cornell University researcher recently helped business leaders make their case that ensuring the availability of high-quality, affordable child care can be as important as tax breaks and other incentives extended to businesses looking to expand or relocate in Iowa.

The Greater Des Moines Partnership is making sweeping quality-of-life recommendations in Project Destiny, a multi-pronged project to create a social infrastructure in Central Iowa. Among its recommendations is redirecting existing dollars and capturing new ones for a $29 million annual investment in early childhood education.

Previous projects shepherded by the Partnership have helped spur a record building renaissance in Des Moines, particularly downtown, but building a social infrastructure may prove to be a more daunting task. One of the greatest obstacles to overcome is a reluctance by policymakers to intrude on the privacy of home and family, said Mildred Warner, a Cornell University economist whose research interests focus on devolution and privatization in local, state and national policy, and their impacts on community and economic development.

Warner was the speaker at a Nov. 18 business forum at Principal Financial Group Inc.’s 711 High St. headquarters that coincided with the Annual Iowa Early Care, health and Education Congress in Ames, where she also spoke.

Research shows most brain development occurs between birth and age 3, yet public spending per child doesn’t peak until they are about to graduate from high school. “Everybody knows we need to spend money on that age group,” said Gloria Hoffmann, an educator attending the session at Principal. “Why are we not?”

The answer isn’t simple, Warner said. “As soon as we talk about it as welfare, it’s a negative,” she said. “We need to change the language.”

Semantics is one thing, she said. The bigger challenge is effecting a paradigm shift in how economic development is viewed. Most economic development efforts focus on short-term results, Warner said, but the return on investments in early childhood education, though significant, isn’t realized for years to come. Some experts say that for every $1 of public spending for young children, $7.15 is saved in juvenile justice costs.

“We so value the privacy of home and family that we are nervous about that, and it prevents us from seeing the opportunity and need for greater public investment,” Warner said. “We don’t want socialized child care. We’ve got to pay attention to moral and political issues because they’re part of the problem.”

Speaking before about 125 business leaders at the downtown Des Moines event, Warner found a receptive audience. “The business community gets it,” she said. “Business leaders can really bring this issue to the forefront.”

Warner’s understanding of the problem comes not just from the vantage point of her research work at Cornell, where she heads the department of city and regional planning, but also fromm personal experience. She said that after the birth of her first child, she “had to become an employer to return to my job as an employee” by hiring a nanny. Sparse child-care options in Ithaca, N.Y.,where Cornell is located, made it difficult for employers to recruit workers to make up for a labor shortage. Cornell, the region’s largest employer, eventually responded with direct payments to employees for day-care costs and other incentives.

Executives at some of Greater Des Moines’ largest companies are struggling with some of the same issues. J. Barry Griswell, chairman and chief executive of Principal Financial Group, said his wants to assist workers in securing affordable, high-quality childcare, but struggles with the logistical concerns. The company’s 10,000 workers are scattered throughout Central Iowa, making cumbersome such issues as transporting students from their home school districts to a central day-care facility in the event of an unexpected school closure.

“We’re willing to step up,” Griswell said, “but we don’t want to be in the daycare business.”

Art Wittmack, chairman and president of the Neumann Bros. Inc. construction company, called the need for a social infrastructure “a stealth issue nobody has focused on” until now. Neither an exclusively private nor public issue, it’s one both sectors should work together to solve, he said.

In Iowa, gross receipts directly related to child care are an estimated $421 million annually, but Warner said that’s “a low estimate at best.” It’s difficult to quantify the economic impact of child care in Iowa since only a handful of facilities are licensed and regulated, and only about 8,000 childcare providers in the state file IRS withholding forms. Warner said there may be as many as 22,000 workers in the child-care field when self-employed providers are considered. There are about 7,000 licensed or regulated child-care centers in the state, but in-home, unlicensed operations bring that number closer to 15,000, she said.

Warner suggested the use of incentives to increase the number of licensed child-care facilities in the state, and also said Iowa child-care workers deserve a raise. Average annual wages for child-care workers in Iowa are between $13,000 and $14,000, compared with a national average of $15,000. “I always thought Iowa was a leader in early-childhood education,” Warner said. “Leaders don’t pay those wages.”

In her talk, Warner highlighted public-private partnerships in New York state and in Greater Kansas City. The latter requires cooperation between two state governments, Missouri and Kansas, as well as local jurisdictions.