It's the Brian Larry Show on WNYC.

Good morning again, everyone.

And now season one, episode one of Ask the Mayor for the Mamdani administration.

My questions and yours for mayors

around Mamdani, call or text, 212, 433, WNYC. Today for people in the five boroughs, as I said before

the news, we'll open it up to the whole region in some future appearances, but we want to begin by

offering this access first to people he was elected to serve per se.

212-433-9-692 call or text. I will also bring in a few of the questions that some of you submitted

through the Brian Larrow Show newsletter and yesterday's pre-asked Mayor call-in segment.

And good morning, Mr. Mayor. Thanks for doing this, and welcome back to WNYC. Good morning, Brian. It's such a pleasure to be back on. How are you? I'm doing okay. Thank you very much. And I see you just finished an event launching the first part of your number one campaign promise, free universal child care. Applications are now open as of today,

I see, for two-year-olds in five selected school districts, 2,000 available slots in Upper Manhattan

and parts of the Bronx, Brooklyn, and Queens. How did you pick which neighborhoods to launch in?

You know, we started this as the first step of what is a vision that will deliver free child care

for every two-year-old by the end of four years.

And we wanted to start with the neighborhoods that have often been left behind in our politics,

the neighborhoods where we see the highest need, the highest demand, and also the quickest

ability to scale up.

Because as Senator Warren often says, child care is infrastructure, and we need to be able

to deliver this on a timeline of this fall. It'll be 2,000 seats. Next year will be 12,000 seats.

And then, as I said, by the end of year four, a seat for every single two-year-old.

And what would it take to accomplish that?

More tax changes, or how do you get all the way there?

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