By Linda Taaffe

A proposed lease extension for a child-care provider at Grant Park could tie up the Los Altos property from city-operated programs for the next 10 years, say Los Altos residents hoping to bring more recreational activities to the south end of town.

The Los Altos City Council is scheduled to decide this summer whether to give Stepping Stones Preschool a 10-year lease extension that operators have requested for two of the four classrooms at Grant Park when the lease expires this November.

Los Altos city officials offered the site to the child-care facility in 2000 after the Los Altos School District ousted all of its tenants from Covington School in preparation for reopening the campus as an elementary school. The tight real estate market at that time would have forced the facility out of town, worsening the city’s child-care shortage, city officials said.

The city offered Stepping Stones a three-year lease and enough space at the 3.5-acre park to provide services to 36 children, 16 infants and 20 preschool children. The $43,900 collected in rent each year went into the city’s recreation budget. Stepping Stones is the only for-profit child-care facility located on city-owned property. About 70 percent of the children enrolled are from Los Altos, operators said.

Neighborhood resident Barbara Loebener said it’s time for the city to give the park back to the community. She was one of the community activists who helped create the park after the Cupertino Union School District declared the Grant School site surplus property in 1982. Loebener said she walked the city precincts while she was pregnant to garner enough support to pass a ballot initiative giving the city approval to acquire the school site for a park.

“Rents are down. The need for day care is down. It’s time to say, ‘We’re going to turn this into a park,’ and time for these guys to move on,” Loebener said. “They need to go to the appropriate place. You can’t take recreation and put it into an empty commercial space. You can put the day-care there.”

Loebener said the business takes up half of the park’s classrooms — space that could be dedicated to recreational programs, especially since many of the programs at Hillview Community Center are at capacity.

“It’s the city’s responsibility to make full use of the recreational facility,” Loebener said. “It is not city policy to turn the park or the building into a moneymaking machine. If that’s the case, they should lease it to the highest bidder, not a day care.”

Dave Brees, director of the city’s recreation department, said city staff have not made a recommendation to the council yet. Staff need to determine whether it would be viable to operate recreational programs in all of the rooms, he said.

“We never want to be in a position to permanently give up recreation space for non-recreation purposes,” Brees said. “On the flip side, we want to use our resources to the fullest capacity.”

Brees said he sees Grant Park as an opportunity and resource for the city to provide programs to the southern portion of town but admits that some programs there have experienced only moderate success.

Kelly Linder, operator of Stepping Stones, said she understands the community’s desire to keep the space open should the demand for recreational programs increase.

That’s why they are asking the city for a five-year lease with a five-year option that would include a clause enabling the city to end the lease any time if it needs the space for recreational programs, she said.

Linder said operating a child-care facility in town remains difficult.