Mayor Shawyn Patterson-Howard is three-quarters of the way through her seventh year in office. She took office in January 2020 promising to fix a City she inherited in financial chaos — no current audits, no bond rating, hidden debt. That inheritance was real. What isn’t real is the idea that seven years is still “early,” or that everything wrong with Mount Vernon’s finances today still belongs to someone else.
It doesn’t. The City’s records — its budgets, its Comptroller’s quarterly reports, and the New York State Comptroller’s audits, the most recent one released this past December — show an administration that has not merely failed to finish the job. On several of the most basic measures of financial governance, Mount Vernon is arguably worse off than when Patterson-Howard took office, and demonstrably no better off than when the State first documented these problems in 2020. Meanwhile taxes have gone up every year, service quality has visibly declined, and the money keeps finding its way to conference travel, ceremonies, and long-term tax giveaways instead of the basic controls state auditors have been asking for since before Patterson-Howard’s first term began.
No fix in year one or two, then a one-time bump, then the deficits came back
The first two years of this administration, 2020 and 2021, are hard to score against Patterson-Howard specifically. She inherited a broken system and then ran straight into COVID. But nothing about those two years shows improvement, either. The finances Mount Vernon had going into 2020 were the finances it had coming out of 2021: broken, and getting no better.
One thing from those first two years is fair to hold against her, though, because it wasn’t inherited: what she did with $41 million in federal ARPA relief. That money arrived starting in 2021, on her watch, as a one-time opportunity with no predecessor’s fingerprints on it. MVCIP’s review of the City’s FOILed spending records found no recovery plan, no eligibility standards, and no tracking for most of it — including the $10 million “revenue replacement” allowance the City claimed as fully spent, with no documentation anywhere of what it actually paid for. Of what the City did document spending in 2021, nearly 70% went to vehicles, not residents. The State’s February 2025 report on federal relief spending couldn’t even evaluate Mount Vernon’s exposure, because the City still hadn’t filed the basic annual reports needed to check. That wasn’t a mess she walked into. It was a test of whether this administration could plan and account for a windfall, and it failed that test immediately — a preview of everything documented below.
The administration’s preferred version of this story skips those two years and starts the clock in 2022, pointing to a reported $9.49 million surplus as proof the turnaround had arrived. What that framing leaves out is where the surplus came from: one-time federal ARPA relief money and other non-recurring revenue, not any structural change in how the City budgets or spends. The Comptroller’s FY2024 report makes the point without meaning to — it notes that, unlike the prior year, the City “did not benefit from a $5 million supplement” of ARPA funds in FY2024, and cites that loss as a driver of the deficit that followed. The 2022 “turnaround” was a temporary subsidy, not a fix, and the deficits resumed as soon as the subsidy ran out.
The New York State Comptroller’s December 2025 audit follow-up (report 2020M-96-F) shows how little actually changed underneath the one good year: the audited general fund deficit stood at $28.9 million as of December 31, 2020, and the State’s projection has it deepening to $32.4 million by December 31, 2024 — worse, not better, four years into a term that was supposed to fix it. There’s no audited figure for 2021 at all; that year’s independent audit still isn’t finished, five years later, which illustrates the same problem in miniature.
Layer the more recent, Comptroller-reported figures on top of that hole, and the trend since the one good year is unbroken:
| Fiscal Year | Result (revenue minus expense) | Comptroller’s characterization |
|---|---|---|
| FY2022 | +$9.49 million | The one surplus year the administration cites |
| FY2023 | –$6.07 million | 17 revenue lines missed 80% of their projected amount |
| FY2024 | –$6.92 million | “Second consecutive year” of negative variance |
| FY2025 | –$5.43 million | “Third consecutive fiscal year” of deficits; a “recurring structural imbalance” |
| FY2026 (through June 30) | –$4.32 million, mid-year | On pace for a fourth straight deficit |
And the State’s new audit follow-up puts specific numbers on how the budgets themselves have been wrong, not just unlucky: Mount Vernon overestimated revenue by $8.8 million in FY2023 and $13.1 million in FY2024, while underestimating appropriations by $3.3 million and $3 million in those same years. FY2024’s overtime line alone was underbudgeted by $4.1 million — 180% over what was appropriated. These are not forecasting misses at the margins. They are budgets built, year after year, on numbers state auditors say the City has no basis for trusting.
Zero policies and procedures in 2020. Zero policies and procedures now.
This is the throughline that makes “inherited mess” stop being an excuse: the specific failure the State first documented in September 2020 — that Mount Vernon had no real financial policies and procedures — is, per the State’s December 2025 follow-up, still substantially true.
Of the eleven recommendations in that original 2020 audit, the State’s follow-up rates only three as fully implemented. Four are only partially done, and four have not been implemented at all — including the two that matter most: the City still has no multiyear financial or capital plan, and its budgets still routinely underestimate expenses while overestimating revenue, five years after the State first said so in writing.
It gets more direct than an audit finding. During Mount Vernon’s most recent Charter Commission process, a commissioner asked every City department — including the Comptroller’s office — to produce its written policies and procedures. Nothing was produced. A follow-up Freedom of Information Law request for those same records came back with the same answer: no responsive records. Asked directly what rules his office actually operates under, the Comptroller’s response was: “We just use the Charter.”
The Charter tells you who holds power and what they’re required to do. It is not a substitute for written procedures on how a department approves spending, documents decisions, keeps records, or trains staff to catch a problem before it becomes a lawsuit. An administration nearly seven years into office that cannot produce a single page of departmental policy, on request, under a formal open-records law, is not an administration still cleaning up someone else’s mess. It’s a description of the same failure the State’s auditors flagged before Patterson-Howard’s second term even began.
The audit backlog, and what it’s still hiding
Comptroller Darren Morton, an independently elected official first elected in 2022 and reelected in 2025, inherited what the State’s follow-up report calls a “six-year backlog of audits” when he took office. He has worked backward through it — 2016 through 2020 are now done. That is real, and it isn’t nothing.
But look at what’s still missing, in the State’s words as of December 12, 2025: independent audits for 2021 through 2024 remain incomplete. Annual Financial Reports for those same years are 225 to 1,321 days late. Only five of the City’s nineteen departments have received the department-level reviews the Charter requires — 26%. And the State’s follow-up draws a direct, blunt line between all of this and the bond-rating promise Patterson-Howard made on a stage in 2023: the City’s bond rating, withdrawn January 2, 2019, cannot be restored until those outstanding audits are complete. It is now more than two and a half years past the “by 2024” date she gave the public, and by the State’s account, the City hasn’t even cleared the audits that stand between it and getting the rating back.
Taxes up every year. Services down. Uncollected taxes ignored.
While the City’s revenue keeps missing its projections, residents’ tax bills have not missed a single year of increases. The base property tax rate has climbed every year since 2019 — a cumulative 35.7% increase in the rate alone by 2026. Factor in the sewer and garbage fees added on top, and MVCIP’s analysis puts the increase over just the last five years at more than 40%.
Mount Vernon has overridden the state’s 2% property tax cap four years running — 2023 through 2026 — after staying under it in 2020, 2021, and 2022. That makes Mount Vernon an outlier even among its Westchester neighbors, who generally stayed under the cap this cycle.
The 2026 override vote itself is worth remembering for how it happened, not just what it did: a special City Council meeting announced by Facebook post one day in advance, a vote that took five minutes and seventeen seconds, a “declaration of necessity” invoked with no actual emergency behind it beyond the City having already run out of cash and taken out a $6.5 million short-term note, and a legally required public hearing on the override held twelve days after the Council had already passed it.
Meanwhile, the City is reportedly sitting on more than $52 million in unpaid property taxes with roughly 1,200 of the City’s 12,000 properties eligible for foreclosure. The City has not foreclosed on a single one in more than a decade. Compliant taxpayers are being asked to make up the difference, year after year, while the City declines to use the enforcement tools it already has.
PILOTs handed out like candy
Separately from the general fund, the Mount Vernon Industrial Development Agency — which Patterson-Howard chairs — has spent the past decade granting long-term property tax exemptions that cost the City and school district far more than they bring in. From 2016 through 2025, the IDA granted $60.4 million in tax breaks to 21 entities while collecting only $15.9 million back in PILOT payments — a net loss of $44.4 million, the majority of it absorbed by the school district.
Opal 115 is the clearest single case study of how these deals get sold. An IDA-commissioned analysis initially claimed the project’s 30-year PILOT would net the City a $10.9 million gain. A corrected version of the same analysis — after a math error crediting the City with the school district’s and county’s share of the payments was fixed — showed the opposite: a $5.8 million loss to the City and a $26 million loss to the schools over the life of the deal. The deal had already closed by the time the correction surfaced. These are not one-year tax breaks; Mount Vernon has been granting them in 30- and even 50-year terms, locking in the loss for decades regardless of who holds the Mayor’s office after Patterson-Howard.
Austerity for residents. Flexibility for City Hall.
The administration’s response to three straight years of deficits was a “temporary spending restriction policy” and an “Austerity Budget Framework” for 2026. In its first two months, the Board of Estimate & Contract approved $20,800 in out-of-town conference travel, including a four-day trip for the Building Commissioner to a resort conference in Las Vegas — while his department sits on an 800-permit backlog and is, inarguably, the worst building department in Westchester County. The Board of Water Supply’s travel got waved through on the stated basis that it falls outside the austerity framework entirely, around the same time water rates went up. A ceremony to unveil a portrait of a former Comptroller was being planned in the same window, funding source undisclosed.
When residents pushed back on a Planning Commissioner’s trip to Detroit in late March, Comptroller Morton’s response conceded that the specific standards being demanded — a defined purpose, measurable outcomes, accountability after the fact — were still just “reasonable expectations” to be worked out through some future review process. An austerity framework three months old, and its architect was on record admitting the rules didn’t actually exist yet.
The $41 million that came and went
The pattern that started with the undocumented $10 million in 2021 held for the rest of the program. Mount Vernon’s full $41.1 million ARPA allocation is now spent or obligated. Less than 5% of it went to direct assistance for residents. The categories that got the money — vehicles ($7.8 million), sewer infrastructure ($6.2 million) — are legitimate municipal costs, but they are not what most residents pictured when “COVID relief” was the phrase attached to the funding. Specific grants show the same documentation gaps the State’s audits keep finding everywhere else: a $25,000 small-business grant with no lease, permits, or evidence the business ever operated; a payment issued after the federal obligation deadline with no proof it met that deadline; $61,835 in prepaid gift cards with no distribution records; a grant review process that reportedly included a City official whose father received $72,000 in ARPA funds. And, most damaging, one time funds spent on recurring expenses with no method of paying those expenses once the one time funds ran out.
It isn’t only the money
Mount Vernon’s fiscal collapse hasn’t happened in a vacuum. In December 2024, the U.S. Department of Justice announced that it had found the Mount Vernon Police Department engages in a pattern or practice of constitutional violations — unnecessary escalation and excessive force, including against people already restrained; strip and body-cavity searches conducted “regularly” until at least 2023; arrests made without probable cause; and discriminatory policing concentrated in the City’s predominantly Black neighborhoods. The investigation, opened in December 2021, found the same kind of root cause the financial audits keep finding: “systemic deficiencies in policies, training, supervision, and accountability.” Unlike the Comptroller’s office, the Police Department answers directly to the Mayor. A full accounting of that record belongs to a later installment of this series, but it’s part of the same picture: seven years in, the basic machinery of city government — how it spends money, how it polices its residents, how it documents either — is still running without the rules a functioning government is supposed to have.
Whose record is this
Patterson-Howard is entitled to say she inherited a disaster. She did. She is not entitled to keep using that inheritance as a permanent explanation for a City that, three-quarters of the way through her seventh year, still cannot produce a set of departmental policies on request, still hasn’t closed out four years of independent audits, still doesn’t have its bond rating back, and just posted its fourth likely consecutive deficit — while taxes went up every single year in between.
And if Comptroller Morton is positioning himself as the alternative — the outsider who diagnosed the mess she made — his record this year makes that a hard sell. He doesn’t control her budgets, her departments, or her Police Department; that much is a fair defense. What he does control is a vote. He sits on the three-member Board of Estimate & Contract, alongside the Mayor and the Council President, and that board approved 828 spending items between January and August 2026. Votes against: zero. Items defeated: zero, aside from three abstentions. Every contract, budget transfer, and salary resolution the administration brought to that board this year, Morton voted for.
That record sits uneasily next to what he’s said out loud. At a town hall last November, asked directly about the risk of a state financial control board, he answered: “We are definitely at risk of that… I think we’ve been at risk for some time,” and said that without a change in trajectory, the City could soon be facing the real question of “are we really a city that needs to be declaring bankruptcy.” He told that same room he didn’t believe the City would hit its 2026 revenue targets. He was right — and then spent the months that followed voting yes on spending that assumed those targets would be met. In January, when the Fire Department asked to shift money inside its budget, he objected on the record that “the overtime is very high” and the item was held; two weeks later it came back and passed, and he hasn’t voted no on anything since. His August 2026 report tells Police, Fire, and DPW they “must” control overtime — over his signature, on a board where every one of those overtime-related requests got his yes vote.
None of that makes his audit-recovery work fake, and it doesn’t let Patterson-Howard off the hook — the items he’s voting on are requests her administration’s departments bring to that board. But “he would have been outvoted anyway” and “he voted yes every time and never tried” are different claims, and the record so far is the second one. If he runs for Mayor in 2027 on the strength of having sounded the alarm, voters are entitled to ask what he did with the vote he actually had.
Neither Patterson-Howard’s third-term bid nor a Morton mayoral run is official as of this writing; both are, at this point, alleged. But the record examined here doesn’t depend on who runs against whom in 2027 — it’s the City’s numbers, for the seven years just past, and the votes of the people who were supposed to be watching them. Mount Vernon residents weighing what comes next deserve the full ledger, not the highlight reel. Right now, that ledger does not support a victory lap for anyone currently in office.