Last week, the Maine House and Senate passed LD 1726: An Act to Build Maine's Economy by Supporting Child Care for Working Families!
As we’ve reported in the past, the bill was designed to guarantee affordable child care for working Mainers by 2030, and remedy the many challenges facing childcare centers and the workers that operate within them.
The new legislation, which was sponsored by Senate President Troy Jackson, strives to achieve this goal in a number of ways. The bill would establish the Maine Child Care Scholarship Program, direct DHHS to implement a program to achieve affordable child care by 2030, and establish the Child Care Task Force.
A recent study found that of the approximately 37,000 children in Maine that are less than three years old, seventy-percent have mothers in the workforce. The same study found that twenty-two percent of Mainers live in an area where there are more than three times as many children under the age of five as there are licensed child care slots.
LD 1726 is expected to be on the Governor’s desk in the coming weeks. This bill would go a long way to support the thousands of working Mainers with children operating within the workforce to provide for their families. We applaud Senator Jackson for his leadership on this issue and we urge Governor Mills to sign LD 1726 into law.