Mayor Kenneth E. Reeves ’72 proposed a plan to provide subsidized daycare for Cambridge children and the children of Harvard and MIT employees during a City Council roundtable discussion last night.

Working with Harvard and MIT, the Cambridge government would fund “an at-cost-like operation” to provide child care that is “reasonably priced for families,” Reeves said.

“They wouldn’t be trying to make a profit; they’d just be trying to charge based on what the real cost is, as opposed to the cost plus profit,” Reeves said in an interview after the meeting. “I think the three of them would get the bill, and they’d figure out who pays how much.”

Reeves says the idea emerged from discussions he has had about how improving childcare could make it easier for women to excel in scientific careers.

Reeves said that “some exploratory work has to be done about the cost” of the program before the proposal is complete. He has not yet discussed it with Harvard or MIT officials.

At the roundtable, which set out the council’s policy goals for the coming year, councillors suggested that Harvard should play a major role in providing affordable housing for city residents.

“It’s a good idea to have Harvard and MIT house their staff at all levels,” Councillor Henrietta Davis said.

A recent satisfaction survey found that Cantabrigians consider affordable housing “the single most important issue facing the City of Cambridge today.”

Councillor Anthony D. Galluccio also proposed that Cambridge enlist Harvard, MIT, and other area institutions to improve the city’s public schools. “We’re the ones in a better position to ask university and corporate partners to consider a partnership in our school systems,” he said.

But City Manager Robert W. Healy warned the council against holding local universities responsible for too many of Cambridge’s needs.

“They are easy to bash,” he said. “They don’t pay taxes; they impact the neighborhoods; everybody hates them. But if it weren’t for Harvard or MIT, we’d be Chelsea.”

Councillor Craig A. Kelley echoed Healy’s sentiment.

“It’s easy to trash Harvard, but Harvard is why people want to be here,” Kelley said in an interview. “[Criticizing Harvard] is very appropriate in context, but in a larger context, it’s about what Harvard’s doing...and whether the city wants that.”

Healy also suggested that councillors’ criticisms of Cambridge itself were sometimes overblown.

When Davis said that Cambridge’s community law enforcement initiatives weren’t “good enough,” Healy responded that “nobody should be shot, nobody should have guns, but we have much fewer incidents of assault with weapons than anywhere else in the state.”

He added later that “we do a heck of a good job on affordable housing. We work very hard. Do we satisfy everybody? Do we satisfy the teachers or the post office? Probably not.”

“We cannot do the things we do without...some degree of understanding that we cannot bring all things to all people all the time,” he said.

—Staff writer Nicholas K. Tabor can be reached at ntabor@fas.harvard.edu.