Hochul and Mamdani unveil free child care plan in New York City

NEW YORK (AP) — New York City parents may soon have access to free child care for their 2-year-olds, under a plan unveiled Thursday by Governor Kathy Hochul and Mayor Zohran Mamdani — a major boon for the city’s mayor on one of his signature campaign promises just days into his new job.

The two Democrats announced the proposals at a celebratory event in Brooklyn, with Hochul and Mamdani casting the initiative as a transformative step toward easing the city’s notoriously high cost of living.

“This is the day that everything changes,” Hochul said, also debuting a wider proposal to expand statewide access to child care in the coming years.

For Mamdani, whose ambitious agenda has been met with heavy scepticism and questions about financial support from the state, the announcement was a significant political victory in the opening days of his mayoralty, coming after a campaign that centred on elevating the needs of the city’s struggling working-class residents.

“Today we take one step to realizing a city where every New Yorker, every family, every child can afford to keep calling it their home,” Mamdani said.

In a nod to the questions surrounding his ability to carry out his agenda, Mamdani added: “To those who doubt the power of the people to make their own destiny, to the cynics who insist that politics is too broken to deliver meaningful change, to those who think that the promises of a campaign cannot survive once confronted with the realities of government, today is your answer.”

The programme will begin slowly, focusing first on “high-need areas” selected by the city, then expanding gradually over years until it becomes a universal program, officials said. The mayor expects the programme to cover around 2,000 children this fall, though he said it was not clear where the first seats would open up.

Hochul, a moderate who is up for re-election this year, has been aligned with the city’s new progressive mayor on his plan to offer free child care in the city, though questions remain on precisely how the program will take shape and what it might cost over the long term.

The governor said she is committing to funding the first two years of the city’s free child care program for 2-year-olds, describing it as an expansion of the city’s existing pre-K and 3-K programs, though she said it was difficult to forecast ongoing costs.

Additionally, Hochul rolled out a sweeping, longer-term proposal to expand access to universal pre-K statewide, with the goal of having the programme available throughout New York by the start of the 2028-2029 school year.

Hochul said she anticipates investing $1.7 billion in the near term for the programs she announced Thursday — bringing her proposed child care and pre-K spending to $4.5 billion for the coming fiscal year.

She will include the plans in her annual state of the state address next week and in her executive budget proposal, which will be subject to debate and negotiations with the state’s legislative leaders.

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