Part 3 of a 4-Part Series
Part 1: What Is the IDA, What Are PILOTs — and Why Should You Care?
Part 2: Why Mount Vernon is Different – and Why That Matters
Following the Money
Parts 1 and 2 of this series showed what PILOTs are, how the Mount Vernon IDA’s governance compares to its peers, and how $44.4 million in tax revenue has been lost over ten years. Now we follow the money.
The system is not broken. It is working exactly as designed. PILOTs flow to developers. Campaign contributions flow back to politicians. Political operatives broker the deals and collect their share. The taxpayers, the schools, and the residents pay the price.
How the Pay-to-Play Ecosystem Works
The cycle works like this: A developer wants to build in Mount Vernon. They apply to the IDA for a PILOT — a tax break that can last up to 30 years. The IDA is controlled by the mayor, who serves as Chair. The developer, their attorneys, their consultants, and their business partners contribute to the mayor’s campaign. The PILOT is approved. The development moves forward. The developer profits. The mayor’s campaign coffers are replenished for the next election. The cycle repeats.
This is not speculation. It is documented in public filings. What makes Mount Vernon’s version of this cycle particularly troubling is the role of political intermediaries — individuals who are neither developers nor elected officials, but who broker the relationships between them and profit from both sides.
The 115 MacQuesten Money Trail
The campaign contributions from parties connected to the Opal 115 development at 115 South MacQuesten Parkway to the mayor’s “Friends of Shawyn Patterson-Howard” campaign committee total $25,050, as documented in New York State Board of Elections filings.
The Paolercio family — Anthony, Michael, Michelle, and Carmen Paolercio, along with their entities Michael Anthony Holdings, Inc. and 50-55 South Mac Realty LLC — are the property owners and sellers of the parcel at 115 South MacQuesten Parkway. Their combined contributions to the mayor’s campaign: $15,000.
Harris Beach — the law firm that performs legal work for the Mount Vernon IDA itself — contributed through its Political Action Committee and individual attorney Michael Curti. Combined: $3,349. The IDA’s lawyers donating to the IDA Chair’s campaign while their firm bills the IDA for legal services should, by itself, be a scandal.
Steven Horton of Grandview Consulting (part of the development team): $2,025. Jonathan Gertman of NRP Group: $650. Kenneth Plummer of Kensworth Consulting: $500.
The math: $25,050 invested in the mayor’s campaign. Over $20M go to the developers as ‘developer fees’.
The Timeline: From Campaign Cash to Tax Break
Before the 2023 election, Mayor Patterson-Howard had signaled to the public that the era of residential PILOTs was winding down. Mount Vernon had, in her own words, “built more than our fair share of affordable housing.” Residents had been clear at public meetings that they wanted the PILOT giveaways to stop.
They had not been heard. They had been managed.
July 13, 2023: The IDA adopted an Inducement Resolution for a 315-unit low-income housing development at 115 South MacQuesten Parkway — a $223 million project led by The NRP Group in partnership with Forward Thinkers Development LLC, Kenneth Plummer’s company. The Inducement Resolution is the formal commitment by the IDA to consider granting tax breaks. It signals to developers, lenders, and political allies that a deal is on track.
November 2023: Patterson-Howard wins re-election. Plummer was her chief fundraiser and deeply involved in her campaign. Campaign finance disclosures show payments from her campaign committee to his firm Kensworth Consulting for political consulting services.
November 30, 2023: The IDA holds a public hearing on the 115 MacQuesten PILOT. A Mount Vernon resident asks the mayor to recuse herself from voting, citing the fact that the developers are among the biggest contributors to her recent campaign.
The mayor’s response: “Sue me.”
January 25, 2024: The IDA passed the Final Resolution approving the 30-year PILOT for Opal 115.
The IDA’s own consultant, Storrs Associates, valued the tax abatement package at just shy of $15.3 million. The projected net benefit to the city? A mere $662,000 — spread over 30 years of speculative assumptions.
On December 17, 2024, Governor Hochul announced the groundbreaking ceremony. Plummer stood there, side by side with the Mayor (and IDA chair) in a hard hat branded “115 Opal.” The man who raised the mayor’s campaign money was now standing beside her at the ribbon-cutting for the project his political work had helped secure.
The Man at the Center: Kenneth Plummer
Plummer is not the only political operative in Mount Vernon’s development ecosystem. But he is the most connected, the most active, and one of the most directly enriched by the IDA deals his political work supports.
Kenneth “Kenny” Plummer is the CEO of Forward Thinkers Development LLC (equity owner on Opal 115) and the president of Kensworth Consulting, a political consulting firm paid by the mayor’s campaign. He has served as a Mount Vernon Democratic District Leader. He has run political action committees. He has been the architect of campaign slates for both city council and school board.
He is also a man with a documented history of violating the rules. In 2012, the New York State Joint Commission on Public Ethics (JCOPE) found that Plummer, while serving as president of DiRA Consulting, had failed to register as a lobbyist while engaging in lobbying activity. The matter resulted in a formal enforcement action by the New York State Commission on Ethics.
Plummer’s relationship with Mayor Patterson-Howard is not arm’s-length. During her 2023 re-election campaign, he served as her chief fundraiser and shadow campaign manager. He brokered donations from developers. He represented her in election-law disputes. He was the operational center of her political organization.
He didn’t just fund the campaign. He ran it. He defended it in court. And then he collected his reward through a development deal worth hundreds of millions of dollars, subsidized by the taxpayers of Mount Vernon.
The False Address
One detail about Plummer captures something essential about the nature of the influence he exercises. An investigation by Black Westchester revealed that Plummer, while serving as a Mount Vernon Democratic District Leader — a position that requires residency in the district — was registered to vote at an address where he did not actually live. He lived in White Plains. The Mount Vernon address he used was not his residence.
Formal challenges were filed with the Westchester County Board of Elections, the Westchester District Attorney’s Office, and the Mount Vernon Democratic City Committee. On July 1, 2025, Plummer resigned his District Leader position.
Forward Thinkers, Forward Slate: Developer Money and the City Council
Plummer’s company is called Forward Thinkers Development. The mayor’s City Council campaign slate was called “Mount Vernon Forward.” Plummer lent the name of his own business to the political campaign that would deliver a council majority aligned with the mayor — and, by extension, with the IDA’s PILOT agenda.
The “Mount Vernon Forward” slate included Danielle Browne, Cathlin Gleason, and Ed Poteat. All three received significant funding from developers with direct interests in Mount Vernon land deals. The contributions are documented in New York State Board of Elections filings.
The single largest contributor across all three? Michael Anthony Holdings and the Paolercio family — the same 115 MacQuesten property owners who gave $15,000 to the mayor. They gave $8,450 to Browne, with additional contributions to Gleason and Poteat.
Danielle Browne has since been elected Mount Vernon City Court Judge. Comptroller Darren Morton, the IDA’s own treasurer, was also supported by Plummer’s new Political Action Committee (PAC) “Rise Up Mount Vernon.”
Rise Up Mount Vernon: Developer Money and the School Board
The IDA’s PILOT deals hurt the school district more than any other institution — as we documented in Parts 1 and 2. And the school board is the one body with the moral authority — and the institutional standing — to push back against PILOT deals that drain the district’s tax base.
That makes the 2025 school board election all the more significant.
In May 2025, “Rise Up Mount Vernon” flooded mailboxes across the city with professionally produced, large-format campaign mailers promoting three school board candidates: Sakai Brown, Erica Peterson, and Randolf Scott.
Rise Up Mount Vernon claimed to be a Political Action Committee. But it did not legally exist as a PAC until May 16, 2025 — three business days before the May 20 election. Every mailer sent and every dollar spent before that date was, technically, unauthorized expenditure by an unregistered political committee.
The Rise Up Mount Vernon Facebook page had been renamed from “Mount Vernon Forward” — the same brand as the city council slate Plummer had organized. New name. Same operator. Same playbook.
The sole reported donor to Rise Up Mount Vernon on its registration date was Rella Fogliano, owner of MacQuesten Development, who contributed $25,000.
The pattern deserves to be stated plainly. Plummer’s PILOT development at 115 MacQuesten will cost the Mount Vernon City School District millions in lost tax revenue over 30 years. And Plummer’s PAC spent developer money to influence which candidates would sit on the school board that oversees the district being drained.
The System, Not Just the Man
It would be convenient to treat this as a story about one bad actor. It is not. Kenneth Plummer is the most visible thread in a web of mutual obligation that includes developers, elected officials, political consultants, law firms, and the IDA itself. He is a symptom, not the disease.
As Good Jobs First documents, the IDA model across New York State is designed to reward those who approve deals and punish those who resist. Mount Vernon is not an outlier. It is the logical endpoint of a system that allows political players to give away public money with minimal oversight.
But Mount Vernon is worse than most. Because in Mount Vernon, the feedback loop between campaign money and IDA approvals is not theoretical. It is documented. The mayor’s chief fundraiser is an equity owner in the largest PILOT deal her IDA has approved. The lawyers for the IDA contribute to the IDA Chair’s campaign. The property sellers contribute to every politician on the slate. And, ironically, even school board candidates are funded by the very developers whose projects drain the school district.
The question is no longer whether the system is corrupt. The evidence is in the filings.
The question is whether it can be stopped.
Part 4 will examine what state legislation, external oversight, and sustained public pressure can do to break the cycle.