The city of Colorado Springs is proposing a new set of rules concerning the location and operation of day care facilities for children.

The general thrust of these new rules is to make it easier for children’s day care facilities to be built and operated in residential neighborhoods in the city.

Children’s day care facilities are commercial, profit-making organizations that ordinarily should be confined to commercial and business zones. Allowing them into residential areas at all should be questioned.

In single-family zones (R-1) in Colorado Springs, the new rules would allow so-called small day care facilities for children to operate. A small day care facility is limited to 6 to 15 children.

In two-family zones (R-2) in Colorado Springs, the new rules would allow “large” day care facilities with an unlimited number of children to operate.

It is the new rules for large day care facilities in two-family (R-2) zones that are most concerning to the established neighborhoods, represented by volunteer neighborhood associations, that are mainly concentrated around the downtown area of Colorado Springs.

Two-family zoning (R-2), allowing two separate houses on one lot, is the most widely used zoning in these neighborhoods, even though most of the lots have only one house built on them.

There are a number of reasons why children’s day care facilities do not fit well into residential zones, such as single-family (R-1) and two-family (R-2City rules require that children’s day care facilities have outdoor play space, which can be noisy when filled with yelling and shouting playing children, particularly during warm weather when windows are open.

The law does provide for putting some kind of fencing around the playground areas connected to children’s day care facilities. That law will stay in effect with the new rules.

There is a current requirement that children’s day care facilities be located on either a collector or an arterial street (not on a quiet residential street). This part of the law would be removed by the new rules.

Children’s day care facilities thus could be located on quiet and narrow back streets where the added traffic created by the children’s day care facility (dropoffs and pickups) would be a major problem.

There is also the problem of parking space for the automobiles of the employees of the children’s day care facility.

Also under the proposed new rules, children’s day care facilities would be allowed as an additional use in a large number of existing buildings and organizations. This would include churches, schools, and other public facilities commonly found in and near residential neighborhoods.

The volunteer homeowners’ associations that surround the downtown area are also concerned about the great haste with which this proposed change in rules for children’s day care centers is being hustled toward City Council.

On Friday, Jan. 30, it was announced that the new children’s day care rules would be presented to the public on the following Tuesday.

That made it difficult for critics of the new proposals to cancel previously made plans and put the Feb. 3 public meeting on their schedule.

In addition, the zoning changes, the most controversial part of the revised children’s day care center plans, were not announced until shortly before the Feb. 3 public meeting.

There was another problem.

City Planning Commission consideration of the proposed rule changes for children’s day care centers could come as soon as just seven days later than that public meeting, thus creating even more of a rushed atmosphere.

The city Planning Department has said it has intentionally placed these changes on a “fast track” for Planning Commission and then City Council consideration. No reason was given for the “fast track” schedule.

It seems unfair to the neighborhoods, however, to allow so little time for reading, understanding, and discussing these complex and detailed changes to how children’s day care centers will fit into our residential (R-1) and (R-2) neighborhoods.

Single-family and two-family neighborhoods in Colorado Springs have been feeling under unfair and undue pressure in the past three years or so.

The state legislature and the Colorado Springs city government have come up with a long series of proposals for densifying these neighborhoods and allowing nonresidential uses into them.

These include proposals for more backyard dwelling units, apartments to replace family homes on bus routes, and now looser rules for children’s day care facilities in R-1 and R-2 residential zones.

News columnist Bob Loevy is a retired professor of political science at Colorado College. He writes about Colorado and national political issues.