Mayor Adams’ budget plan did not include millions of dollars in funding needed to keep thousands of the city’s families on child care vouchers, putting a critical program for working families at risk of being significantly chopped down in scale.
Adams had been counting on the state to pony up hundreds of millions of dollars to ensure no parent loses access to their current subsidy. But Gov. Hochul and state lawmakers included only $350 million in the state budget to help avert a looming fiscal shortfall, with Hochul saying the city needed to come up with the rest.
Rather than include that money in his proposal Thursday, Adams told reporters at Bayside High School in Queens the he was still pushing to get the money from Albany — an unlikely scenario given a state budget deal announced earlier this week.
“We’re still going to fight,” Adams told reporters at Bayside High School in Queens. “We believe that this was a state program. We were encouraged to enroll as many students as possible.”
“This was their project. They funded it — and to now say, ‘We don’t want to fund it anymore,’ that’s wrong,” he said.
A final municipal budget will be negotiated with the City Council by the end of next month.
Under the terms of the deal in Albany, New York City has to match the state’s investment in order to receive the new funds, according to the governor’s office.
‘”With these new resources, we’ll offer New York City the opportunity to match our commitment, solving this year’s crisis,” Hochul said at the State Capitol on Monday, where she announced the agreement. “Every family deserves access to high-quality child care.”
Luiz C. Ribeiro for New York Daily News
Mayor Eric Adams sits next to New York Governor Kathy Hochul during a press conference at New York City Hall on Monday, July, 31, 2023. (Luiz C. Ribeiro for New York Daily News)
A report by The New School’s Center for New York City Affairs estimated the city needed between $823 to $907 million to prevent families from being kicked out of the initiative, known as the Child Care Assistance Program, and other severe disruptions.
In a private briefing on the city budget Thursday morning with Council members, Adams expressed dismay over Albany’s arrangement: “They’re making us pick up $300 million of their program,” he said in a recording, obtained by the Daily News.
But with budget bills still not printed, sources at the virtual meeting said the mayor urged Council members to keep pushing Albany to provide the extra funding, despite the deal seemingly being in place. Legislative leaders have questioned whether Hochul announced the general agreement too early with other key issues still being hashed out.
“We’re still negotiating with the state,” Tiffany Raspberry, Adams’ deputy mayor for intergovernmental affairs, told reporters. “We’re still in constant conversations every day. So, we’re going to advocate for New Yorkers until the ink is dry on those bills.”
The governor’s office has defended its position by pointing to the discrepancies between how much the state versus the city contribute to the subsidy program, which is just one facet of the city’s complex child care system. Others — such as funding for the city’s popular 3-K program or a pilot that extends the hours care is available — were included in the mayor’s budget on Thursday.
“Since taking office, Governor Hochul has increased funding for childcare subsidies in New York City by 124% while City spending has remained relatively flat for over 25 years,” said Avery Cohen, a spokeswoman for Hochul. “Our increases in funding have advanced an agenda to make child care more accessible and affordable for families statewide.”
“Even with massive state subsidies, keeping hundreds of thousands of kids enrolled in child care must be a shared responsibility,” she said. There are 130,00 New York children covered by the Child Care Assistance Program.
In the years following the pandemic, the city’s Administration for Children’s Services, which administers the program locally, used an increase in child care funding to significantly expand the vouchers.
In 2022, there were about 7,400 children enrolled with a low-income voucher. Today, there are close to 63,000 children receiving assistance, available to families that earn less than 85% of the state’s median income.
But funding for subsidized care did not keep pace with the uptake in vouchers. Without new funding, ACS previously estimated between 4,000 and 7,000 children could lose vouchers every month, as reimbursement costs rise and more parents on cash assistance — who are first in line for the vouchers — go back to work. The fiscal cliff was first reported by New York Focus in February.
Advocates warned that any funding shortfalls could have profound effects on children and their parents, including their ability to work.
Pete Nabozny, a policy director at The Children’s Agenda, part of the Empire State Campaign for Child Care that pushed for the voucher funding, said he was waiting for more details before he could tell if the investment was really going to help mitigate the harm.
“The prospect of a good chunk of those kids losing care and parents scrambling, wondering how they’re going to pay their bills…,” said Nabozny. “At scale, it really threatened to be an incredibly disruptive period for families, but also for employers and businesses and our whole economy.”
