Reporter Katerina Barton tells NPR's Ayesha Rascoe about New Mexico's plan to provide free childcare for state residents.

New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani has notched some successes in advancing progressive policies and primary candidates. But is there an appetite for that kind of thing across the rest of the country? That question led us to checking in on New Mexico, which is establishing a system of free childcare for nearly anyone in the state. Reporter Katerina Barton is following that in Santa Fe and joins us now. Welcome to the program.

RASCOE: New Mexico rolled out what they're calling universal free childcare in November. How's that supposed to work?

BARTON: Well, the idea is that any parent in the state, regardless of how much money they make, can have the state pay 100% for the cost of childcare for kids up to 13. The only requirement is that a parent has to either be in school or working or looking for work.

RASCOE: Childcare is a huge burden on parents across the country, and there have been some other states that have talked about trying to provide free childcare. How is New Mexico able to pay for this?

BARTON: Mostly from oil and gas tax revenues. New Mexico is America's No. 2 crude oil producer behind only neighboring Texas. So this probably isn't an avenue for most states. Back in 2020, New Mexico made a trust fund that earmarked some of that revenue for early childhood education. It started with $300 million, and now that's grown to $11 billion. The state has slowly been expanding its childcare subsidies over the years, raising the income limits, and now it's open to everyone.

BARTON: Well, the program has been popular. So popular, in fact, that the main challenge is that there's not enough availability of childcare. The state isn't giving exact numbers for how big the supply-and-demand gap is, but since the state started, they say that they've added licensed childcare capacity for nearly 4,000 kids. But we also know that before this program started, it was estimated that there were about 15,000 kids under the age of 6 in New Mexico who couldn't find childcare.

There are six counties that have the highest gap between supply and demand, and one of those is Santa Fe County. Here's Lilia Doyle, a mother in Santa Fe County. She says that her 2-year-old son has been on a wait list at six different daycares since November. And she works as a librarian. She'd like to go back to work, but she needs to find childcare first, and she says the process has been really tedious. She wants to find an open spot for her son, but she also wants to vet some of the daycares, and she says it's been a lot of work.

LILIA DOYLE: I'm so thankful we have universal child care, but I just think it needs some tweaking to be 100% effective for parents.

BARTON: Well, state officials say they don't have that number because that's specific to each childcare center. But in an interview, the Early Childhood Education and Care Department that runs the program told me that they have this ambitious goal to close that gap in the next one to two years.

BARTON: I think there's still a lot to flesh out. The department that runs the program is in the process of making new rules to codify the program with a bill that was signed into law earlier this year. They're working on incentives to make it easier for new childcare centers to open. And recently, the state changed zoning regulations for home-based childcare centers. And at the start of the program, they raised the rates that childcare centers are getting per kid, and they're now working on increasing wages for people working in those centers. They're also giving loans to providers to build and expand their centers, which is also adding more capacity. So there's lots of capacity building going on.

RASCOE: That's Katerina Barton, a reporter in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Thank you so much for speaking with us today.

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