When lawmakers whacked 8 percent from the department of health and human services budgets for this year they focused on the bottom line. Jennifer Gardner, a Brigham City mother, saw the face of her foster daughter.

"(Legislators) have to see the big numbers and the money for providers, and I understand that," Gardner told members of the Deseret News Editorial Board on Monday as her toddler, Mylie, busied herself with a snack pack of Cheerios. "But they don't see those cuts as they are passed to foster-care families. We're providers, too, but they don't see those numbers."

The state of Utah provides foster families $15 per day for most infants and $18 per day for most teens. Gardner and managers of the Utah Foster Care Foundation told the editorial board that the amounts, which could well face another cutback next year, do not come close to covering the basics of providing stable, quality care of the children in the state's foster care system.

The amount is more than $5 less than child day-care centers in the area charge per day; it's $10 less than most kennels along the Wasatch Front charge to board a dog for a day. During the general session of the Legislature, lawmakers receive $54 a day, including weekends, for expenses.

Parents like Gardner are certainly willing and able to step up to care for the 2,600 children the state has in state custody at any given time after they've been removed from homes where abuse or neglect have been substantiated, said foundation CEO Kelly Peterson. "But they don't want to go in the hole doing it," she added, noting that lawmakers are literally banking on the giving and goodness of the hearts of foster families to make up the difference.

"Foster parents aren't the kind of people who are going to let a foster child just go without," Peterson said.

Working foster parents aren't given money for day care. With 62 percent of Utah mothers in the work force, that precludes a lot of families from even considering taking a foster child, said Gardner, who is a volunteer advocate for Box Elder County area foster families.

Travel costs to and from state-ordered appointments, visits with biological parents, medical and mental health appointments, swimming lessons, school activities and a host of other errands families need to run every week are also not adequately compensated.

Utah foster parents are reimbursed 36 cents per mile; the current IRS travel reimbursement rate is 58 cents per mile.

The needs of the child begin on arrival, Gardner said, noting that often a child will be turned over to a foster family wearing a T-shirt donated by a hospital worker and a diaper.