From WNYC, I'm Brian Lairor. This is my daily politics podcast. It's Tuesday, June 2nd.

And now season one, episode one of Ask the Mayor for the Mamdani administration. My questions and yours for

mayors around Mamdani. 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?

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?

You know, we've seen part of that path through just these last few months where we partnered with the governor to secure

$1.2 billion to not only fix the issues that we had seen with 3K, but also to create,

for the first time in New York City history, 2K for free for New Yorkers. That funds it for not

only this year, but also the expansion of 12,000 seats next year. And then we would continue this work

to expand it all the way to every child. That's something that I'm incredibly excited to do with the

governor. She's spoken time and time again of her commitment to the cause of universal child care.

And I share that same commitment. And I would say that to New Yorkers who are excited to sink

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