In Mount Vernon there is plenty of talk about business development.
There is the Envision Mount Vernon comprehensive plan, which promises to channel new growth into the downtown. There is the 2026 State of the City speech, which promised to expand the tax base through development. There is a half-million-dollar grant program for upscale boutiques, art galleries, and even karaoke bars to fill vacant storefronts. There is an entire Industrial Development Agency dedicated to attracting jobs.
Where do prospective investors and visitors usually land when they come to Mount Vernon? In one of our two downtown parking garages.
Spoiler alert: That is not a good first impression.
On March 3, 2026, the City of Mount Vernon announced that the top deck of the parking garage at Sidney Avenue and Gramatan would close until further notice “out of an abundance of caution and in the interest of public safety.” A hole had opened in the deck. The City covered it with a metal plate. No timeline was given for repair.
Mount Vernon’s foyer
Mount Vernon has two municipal parking garages downtown: the one at Sidney Avenue and Gramatan, and another one next to City Hall a few blocks away.
Street parking on Gramatan during business hours is nearly impossible, which means most visitors end up in one of these two structures. The first thing a customer, an investor, or a prospective business owner sees when they get out of the car is the interior of a Mount Vernon garage. The garages are the foyer to our commercial corridor.
Does Mount Vernon need to attract more business? One hundred percent.
Mount Vernon’s sales tax collections fell roughly 7 percent over two years while neighboring cities grew. There are more than two dozen vacant or shuttered storefronts on a few-block stretch of Fourth and Gramatan Avenues. Property taxes have risen 44 percent faster than inflation since 2001, because in the absence of business tax revenue property owners (and renters) have to pick up the tab.
The agency that’s supposed to attract business to Mount Vernon
The Mount Vernon Industrial Development Agency (IDA) exists to do one job: bring jobs and businesses to Mount Vernon. State law gives the IDA real tools for it. Sales tax exemptions, mortgage recording tax exemptions, revenue bonds, and property tax abatements through PILOT agreements. Used well, those tools build a tax base. Used poorly, they hollow one out.
In Mount Vernon, the IDA has spent most of the last decade handing PILOTs to residential housing projects rather than building an industrial or commercial base.
See our 4-part series for more information.
The IDA staff hired to do “business development” reads less like a professional roster than a list of campaign staffers.
In January 2017, then-Mayor Richard Thomas had the IDA board create two new positions: “strategic planner” and “business development director.” He filled the strategic planner job with his special assistant Maria Donovan at $95,000. He filled the business development director job with his campaign worker Roberta James at $86,000, plus a 50 percent annual bonus added by hand to her otherwise-typed employment contract.
The next Mayor, Shawyn Patterson-Howard, hired her own campaign manager, Robin Mack, as IDA business development director. Mack also had no visible business development background. She has since left.
Right now the Mount Vernon IDA does not have a single full-time employee. Pam Tarlow, who runs the Urban Renewal Agency, is filling in part time. She is merely keeping the lights on at an agency whose entire purpose is business development.
That is the agency responsible for attracting jobs to the state’s eighth-largest city.
Downtown Garage 1: Sidney Avenue and Gramatan
News 12 covered the March 3 closure. A gym manager whose customers park there told the reporter that “no one cleans out the elevators. They’re broken.” A gym member used blunter language: “It’s absolutely disgusting. It’s littered with homeless people. People smoke weed, do crack in the hallways. It reeks of urine.”
The Integrity Project visited the garage, and yes, it is gross.
Beyond the closed top deck, the garage operates with two of its three stairwells sealed. Through the windows of the sealed ones you can see piles of trash. The wall graffiti and the fly population speak for themselves.
Downtown Garage 2: The City Hall Garage
You do have an alternative to parking at the Sidney / Gramatan Ave Garage a few blocks down at city hall. Except that garage is in even worse shape.
It has not had a working elevator in decades. All staircases are closed, which forces pedestrians to walk down the same ramps as cars. The lighting failed at some point and was replaced with construction lights strung along the ceiling. Concrete has spalled to the point that rebar is exposed in places. Some of the main beams have visible cracking. Water intrusion is everywhere. One main throughway has been closed for months, with the deteriorated section shored up by small support beams.
Those are the conditions at the parking garage attached to the seat of city government – it is not just gross, but looks unsafe.
What the City says
At the City Council Work Session on February 23, 2026, Mayor Patterson-Howard said on the record that the City has “gotten an engineering report on every city structure in the city of Mount Vernon,” that the reports “were updated,” and that the City is “aware of every structural issue with every city building.”
We submitted a FOIL request to verify that statement. We asked for the engineering report on the City Hall parking garage.
The response from the City:
“Please be advised that no responsive records were identified with respect to the City Hall Parking Garage.”
There are two ways to read that response and only two.
- Either the City has a structural evaluation of the City Hall garage and withheld it from a lawful FOIL request, which would be a violation of New York’s Freedom of Information Law.
- Or the City has never had the visibly distressed City Hall garage evaluated by an engineer, in which case the mayor’s statement on February 23 was not accurate.
How is Mount Vernon supposed to attract businesses if our garages are a public eyesore?
Real business development is unglamorous. It is keeping the streetlights on. It is a building department that processes permits in a reasonable time.
It is a municipal parking garage that does not smell like the urinal at CBGB’s in the ’80s.
It is a structural engineering report that exists on paper, in a file, where a FOIL officer can find it.
It is staffing the IDA with someone who knows how to recruit investors and commercial tenants, rather than with the mayor’s most recent campaign manager.
We showed the city hall parking garage pictures to a Mount Vernon resident who is a licensed architect. Her professional assessment was one sentence: “Do not park in there.”