We were talking with a Mount Vernon homeowner about the 2 percent school tax increase that voters rejected on May 19. He was against it. He was not arguing against schools. He was arguing because of what 2 percent does to his bill.

“If you were paying $37,000 a year in property taxes on a single-family home,” he said, “2 percent would bite you too.”

He is not unusual on his street. Many Mount Vernon homeowners pay $20,000, $25,000, $30,000 a year on homes that would sell for half what comparable homes sell for in Bronxville, a few hundred feet away.

And here is the thing that makes the tax bills extra soul-crushing: the school district the taxes fund is, by the State Comptroller’s own measurement, the most financially distressed in the entire state of New York. Last year, the district closed three schools. The State Education Department has placed the district under a state monitor.

It is fair to ask if tax dollars are being put to good use, especially as the school district is asking for more.

It is also fair to ask whether everybody is paying their fair share of taxes in Mount Vernon.

Both questions are timely. City property taxes are due this week.

The $59M Gorilla in the Room

Let’s start with some property owners that are not paying at all.

City Comptroller Dr. Darren Morton has been straightforward about this much. In December 2024, his office published the city’s delinquent property tax list. More than 600 parcels were behind on their taxes. Some of those owners had not paid in decades. The total amount owed to the city: roughly $59 million.

Mount Vernon has not foreclosed on a single property for tax delinquency in more than ten years. The message: In Mount Vernon you can just stop paying your property taxes with impunity.

In January 2026, Morton’s office filed the first round of foreclosure proceedings in years. Whether that effort goes anywhere remains to be seen. The city’s track record on collecting what it is owed is, to put it mildly, not good.

Some homeowners pay much less than they should

There are also property owners who pay significantly less than their neighbors.

Hint: it helps to have friends in high places.

Mount Vernon’s property tax system makes this kind of disparity hard to see. Most Westchester communities, including Bronxville and Pelham right next door, did what is called a revaluation years ago. They went parcel by parcel, looked at what each home was actually worth on the market, and set the assessment to match. If your house is worth $800,000, it is assessed at $800,000. Anyone can do that math.

Mount Vernon does not do this. The city uses an antiquated system that assesses the average home at about one and a third cents on every dollar of actual market value, then the State translates that back through a published ratio each year. A house worth $800,000 sits on the city’s rolls for something like $10,800. This makes the tax rolls hard to understand by anybody who is not an expert.

We decided to look anyway.

What we found on one block

Second Avenue South is a long residential street in Mount Vernon’s south end. It has 131 one-, two-, and three-family homes on it.

On one seven-home stretch of the block, four homes have received a documented assessment cut since the 2020 roll. The other three have not. The home with the highest Zillow market estimate on that block, at 254 Second Avenue South, ended up with the lowest tax bill among the homes that don’t qualify for senior exemptions.

The Brewingtons live at 254. Their home is worth roughly $906,500, according to Zillow. Their total annual property tax bill is $8,327. Their next-door neighbor at 250 pays $17,912. The home at 234 pays $20,808. The home at 214 pays $23,018. Setting aside 222, which qualifies for a senior tax exemption, the block’s median property tax bill is around $19,600.

The Brewingtons pay about forty percent of what their neighbors pay on a home that, by Zillow’s estimate, is the most valuable on the block.

Why are the Brewingtons paying so much less?

This is the question we kept coming back to. Some possibilities:

The Brewingtons could have filed a successful grievance with the city’s Board of Assessment Review. That mechanism is open to every Mount Vernon homeowner.

The Assessor’s office could have made an administrative change for an inventory correction, a building permit, or a clerical fix. That route does not require the Board.

Or something else happened that we cannot see from the public record.

Whichever it was, it has happened at least twice.

The city’s online tax portal shows one cut. The Brewington assessment dropped from $6,550 to $5,500 on the 2024 roll, a 16 percent reduction. The portal’s history reaches back to the 2021 roll and shows the assessment holding steady before that. Long-time observers of the property told us there had been earlier reductions. Until this month, we could not verify that from any public source.

Now we can. In July, MVCIP obtained the city’s official final assessment rolls for 2020, 2021, and 2023 under FOIL. The final roll is the signed legal record of every assessment in the city, the document the portal is supposed to reflect. The 2020 Final Roll lists 254 Second Avenue South at $7,500. So does the 2021 Final Roll. On the 2023 roll, the number is $6,550.

Somewhere between the 2021 and 2023 rolls, the Brewington assessment was cut 13 percent. The portal’s public history shows no trace of that cut. It displays the lower number as if it had always been there, including for 2021, a year when the signed official roll says otherwise.

Add the two cuts together and the Brewington assessment has fallen 27 percent since 2020, from $7,500 to $5,500. Over roughly the same period, the city raised its tax rate by about 26 percent. For most homes on this street, rising rates meant rising bills, year after year. That did not apply to the Brewingtons.

There is one roll we cannot check, the one that would show exactly when the first cut landed. The city says the 2022 assessment roll file is corrupted. More on that below.

Then there is the street as a whole. In five years of records, 117 of the 131 homes on Second Avenue South, 89 percent, saw no assessment change at all. Checking the FOIL’d official rolls against the portal turns up nine homes with documented cuts, eleven separate reductions among them, including cuts the portal’s public history never shows. Four of the nine sit on the Brewington block.

The cuts bunched in time. The 2025 roll, the most recent, produced zero cuts across all 131 homes. The 2024 roll produced four. Two of those four were on the Brewington block. The documented cuts ranged in size from 6 percent to 40 percent. None of the seven owners whose cuts appear in the portal appealed any further. There are no court filings naming any of them in the New York courts electronic filing system, which is where appeals of denied grievances would show up.

Either every one of those cuts went through the Board of Assessment Review cleanly, with the Board granting the reduction the owner asked for. Or some of them came from administrative changes the Assessor made without the Board being involved at all. We cannot tell which from the public record, because Mount Vernon does not publish either kind of record.

Who the Brewingtons are

Curtis L. Brewington Sr. has chaired the Mount Vernon Board of Ethics since at least January 2022. The Board of Ethics is the city body that is supposed to receive complaints about misconduct or conflicts of interest by Mount Vernon’s officers and employees.

Kathie J. Brewington has been President of the Mount Vernon NAACP, Branch #2161, for more than two decades. She is also a Mount Vernon city employee. Public salary data lists her as a “General Employee” earning $13,712 in 2025, a figure consistent with a part-time or stipended role. She is also active in the ministry at Macedonia Baptist Church.

City Comptroller Dr. Darren Morton, the official whose office signs the city’s delinquent property tax lists and files foreclosure petitions, is the pastor at Macedonia Baptist Church. He was re-sworn for a second term as Comptroller in January 2026.

So the chair of the Board of Ethics is married to a city employee, who attends the church whose pastor is the elected official responsible for collecting property taxes. And the family home of that couple has now received two documented assessment cuts that took their tax bill to roughly forty percent of what their neighbors pay.

What about the rest of Mount Vernon?

To check, we ran the same five-year history pull for two other Mount Vernon streets: Magnolia Avenue in Oakwood Heights (50 single-family homes), and Elmsmere Road in Chester Heights (18 single-family homes). Chester Heights is the wealthiest of the three neighborhoods. The median home on Elmsmere sits on the rolls with a city-assigned market value above $1 million.

On Elmsmere Road, every single one of the 18 homes saw its city tax rise by 9.3 percent from 2024 to 2026, exactly the citywide rate increase. Not one Elmsmere parcel had its assessment cut in that window. Their owners pay what their assessments say they should pay.

Oakwood Heights: 17 Magnolia Avenue

There is another way to live in Mount Vernon without paying city property tax.

17 Magnolia Avenue is a 3,700-square-foot single-family home in the Oakwood Heights neighborhood, with a city-assessed market value of $1.6 million. A non-exempt homeowner with that assessment would owe roughly $45,000 a year in combined city, county, and school taxes. The 2026 city tax bill at 17 Magnolia is $225, which is just the flat refuse fee. There is no city property tax. There is no school tax. The household pays only $1,325 in county tax.

The owner of record on the 2025 assessment roll is Allen Memorial Church of God in Christ. The pastor of Allen Memorial is Carlton C. Spruill. Spruill is also Mount Vernon’s Water Commissioner, an appointed position with a city salary of $125,000 a year according to public payroll data. Eight people are registered to vote at the address, including the commissioner, indicating it serves as the household residence.

The arrangement is legal. New York Real Property Tax Law section 462 exempts residences owned by religious organizations and used to house their clergy. The provision turns a $1.6 million home into a property that pays roughly the same total tax as a small vacant lot.

The Spruill family has deep ties in Mount Vernon. Carlton Spruill’s father, Dr. Larry Spruill, served for years as the city’s official historian, an appointment made by the mayor. The position of the water commissioner that his son holds is also a mayoral appointment.

The records the city won’t show

Every property owner can challenge their property taxes. The Mount Vernon Board of Assessment Review has three members appointed by the City Council, who meet on the third Tuesday in June each year to hear grievances.

State law requires the Board to keep minutes of its hearings and file them with the City Clerk’s office. State law requires the Board to deliver to the Assessor a written list of every assessment change it has approved. State law requires each Board member to disclose, in writing, any interest they have in any property whose assessment they are reviewing.

None of those records are published on the city’s website. The Board is not listed on the city’s Agenda Center, where the Planning Board, the Zoning Board, the City Council, and the Board of Ethics all post their agendas and minutes. There is no annual report. The master list of changes the Board has approved each year is nowhere a resident can find it.

To that list, add the 2022 assessment roll itself. When MVCIP requested the official final rolls for 2020 through 2023 under FOIL on July 6, the city produced three of the four. On the 2022 roll, the city’s FOIL office first said the file was corrupted and promised it by July 20. On July 21, the promise moved to August 21, with the Assessor’s Office “awaiting information from a third-party vendor.” The explanation may turn out to be mundane. As of today, the only year of the city’s assessment records that cannot be located is the year that would show precisely when the Brewington assessment was first reduced.

The portal does not fill the gap. As documented above, the portal’s public history displays a 2021 assessment for the Brewington home that contradicts the signed 2021 Final Roll. Whatever the portal is showing residents, it is not a reliable record of what the city actually assessed.

We will FOIL the rest of the relevant records, and share what we find.

Who is paying for all this?

Mount Vernon residents have absorbed more than 40 percent in cumulative property tax increases over the past five years. Since 2012, the City Council has overridden the New York State tax cap every year it could, by a cumulative 34.73 percent. Since 2001, Mount Vernon property taxes have risen 44 percent faster than inflation.

It seems that not everyone is paying these increases equally.

They have not landed on 254 Second Avenue South, whose assessment has been cut twice since 2020 and whose bill is about forty percent of what neighbors in comparable houses pay. They have not landed on 17 Magnolia Avenue, the residence of Water Commissioner Spruill, which pays $1,550 a year on a $1.6 million home because the property belongs to a church.

Coincidentally, both addresses we identified as outliers happen to be home to Mount Vernon city employees.

They have not landed on the more than 600 owners on the December 2024 delinquent list, some of whom have not paid in decades, from whom the city has not foreclosed in more than ten years.

They have landed on the homeowner from the lead of this article paying $37,000 a year. They have landed on the eighteen Elmsmere Road homeowners whose bills rose 9.3 percent in two years. They have landed on hundreds of households across Mount Vernon without a political connection, without a clergy exemption, and without the option of simply not paying.

The story of property tax in Mount Vernon is not really about one family on one block, or one house in Oakwood Heights. It is about a system that has been allowed to drift for decades while making it impossible for outsiders to see how the favorable outcomes are getting handed out. The families named here are examples. There are almost certainly others.

The bills are rising. They are being paid by the people who don’t have an angle.

What the celebration leaves out

−$5.8M to the city  ·  −$26M to the schools

The mayor celebrates. The community pays. That is the corrected price of this deal over its 30-year tax break, from the study the IDA itself commissioned.

Two months before the hard hats came out, a consultant hired by the city’s own Industrial Development Agency finished a study of this same project. It found that Opal 115 will leave the City of Mount Vernon $5.8 million short and the Mount Vernon school district $26 million short over the life of its tax break.

None of that appears in the post. It does not mention that the mayor chairs the agency that approved the tax break, that she voted for it, or that one of the partners on the project is Kenneth Plummer, her chief fundraiser and the operator who ran her 2023 re-election campaign.

Let’s start with the agency that approved it:

An Industrial Development Agency, or IDA, is a public agency with one purpose: to grow the local economy. It does that mostly by handing developers tax breaks, called PILOTs, short for Payments In Lieu Of Taxes (aka ‘tax breaks’), on the theory that the buildings, jobs, and spending that follow will pay the city back many times over.

In Mount Vernon, that is not what happened. The city’s IDA has become a hotbed of dysfunction and cronyism, approving tax breaks that run as long as 30 years for politically connected developers while the growth it promised never showed up.

The clearest sign is the cash register. Mount Vernon’s sales tax revenue, the simplest measure of how much business a city is actually doing, has fallen, down about 7 percent since 2023, even as the IDA kept giving exemptions away. Over the same years, sales tax in neighboring communities like New Rochelle kept climbing. The gap between the two cities widened from $9.3 million in 2016 to $15.7 million in 2025. If the tax breaks were working, that gap would be shrinking.

So why has the Mount Vernon IDA not worked out? That is the question the agency finally put to an outside firm, the consultants at Urbanomics, asking them to put numbers to its own track record. The study just landed, and the findings are damning.

They were not always going to be. An earlier financial analysis by the IDA had reported that the city’s two newest tax breaks would benefit Mount Vernon. The biggest, Opal 115, looked like a winner, with the city roughly $10.9 million ahead.

The number was wrong. Not a rounding difference. A basic error, and it ran in one direction. The direction happened to favor the deals the IDA had already approved.

The corrected calculation, prepared for the IDA by the consulting firm Urbanomics lands somewhere very different. Over the life of the PILOT, the tax-break agreement, 115 MacQuesten leaves the city $5.8 million short and the school district $26 million short. The report’s own summary states that the deficits persist for both municipal and district services.

What the error was, in plain terms

A PILOT payment is split three ways. The city keeps about 32 cents of every dollar. The school district gets about 60 cents. The county gets about 8. Three pockets, set by the tax rates.

The earlier analysis compared the entire PILOT payment to the city’s costs alone. It credited the city with money that belongs to the schools and the county, then declared a surplus. Run the real city share against the real city costs and the surplus disappears. What looked like a $10.9 million gain becomes a $5.8 million loss.

School board trustee Chris McDonough, who holds the school district’s non-voting seat on the IDA, caught the error and walked the board through it. The corrected report uses the math he laid out.

This is the deal the mayor’s fundraiser owns a piece of

Opal 115 has been a photo opportunity from the start. In December 2024 the mayor and Kenneth Plummer stood together at the groundbreaking, in hard hats branded with the project’s name, holding golden shovels. This week’s topping-off ceremony is the same cast on the same site, one floor further along.

Plummer is not a bystander on this project. He is an equity owner, through his firm Forward Thinkers Development. He was also the mayor’s chief fundraiser, the operator who ran her 2023 re-election campaign, and the person her campaign paid for fundraising services. The mayor chairs the agency that handed the project a 30-year tax break, and she voted on it, even after residents asked her at a public hearing to recuse herself.

The sequence is this. An agency controlled by the mayor paid for an analysis. The first version made her fundraiser’s project look like a gain for taxpayers. The error survived until the math was checked. The corrected version shows the project losing the city and the schools more than $31 million combined.

Call it a mistake if you like. A mistake this size, caught this late, is its own verdict. At best it shows ineptitude, an agency that cannot run the arithmetic on the tax breaks it gives away, and a government that does not check its own work before handing out public money. The timing is the rest of the story. The IDA approved this 30-year tax break in January 2024 and closed it that October, and construction was underway long before anyone noticed the math ran backwards. Correcting a figure on paper in 2026 changes nothing on the ground. Kenneth Plummer, the mayor’s fundraiser and an equity owner on the project, already has his deal. He is laughing all the way to the bank.

The schools were right

For years, the Mount Vernon school district has said the same thing about these tax breaks: they do not cover their costs, and the schools absorb the worst of it. The district sued in 2018 just to win a non-voting seat at the IDA table. It passed a resolution in 2025 stating that only an elected school board should have the authority to give away school tax revenue. It was told, in effect, to wait.

The IDA’s own consultant now agrees with the district. On the projects already built, the report finds the same pattern.

In the consultant’s own words, past PILOTs grossly underestimated municipal and school district costs and produced significant net deficits for both. That is not an outside critic. That is the report the agency paid for.

Why were the numbers this wrong?

An honest mistake lands on both sides. Sometimes it reads too high, sometimes too low. This one did not. Every error in the earlier analysis pushed the same direction, and that direction made the deals the IDA had already approved look profitable. A report that wrong, tilted that consistently, stops looking like chance.

Then there is who benefits. The developers who come before this agency are among the mayor’s most generous campaign donors. Parties tied to the 115 MacQuesten deal alone gave $25,050 to the mayor’s committee, documented in state Board of Elections filings. The mayor chairs the IDA. The IDA hired the consultant. The consultant’s first draft made the donors’ project look like a win for the city. None of that is illegal. All of it is on the record. You are allowed to ask why the only version that flattered these deals came out first.

The cost is real

The buildings go up. People move in. They call 911, set out the trash, enroll their kids. Those services cost money, and the corrected report confirms the tax breaks do not pay for them. The gap gets covered one of two ways. Everyone else’s taxes rise, or services get cut.

Should this agency be approving anything?

Step back from one report and look at the record. In 2014 the State Comptroller found the IDA approved projects with no cost-benefit analysis, could not produce basic project documents, and imposed no penalties when developers missed their job promises. In 2026, the city’s own consultants confirmed what residents suspected all along: The Mount Vernon IDA is undermining the finances of the City and the School district.

An agency that cannot run its own arithmetic, cannot collect what it is owed, and cannot say no to the people who fund the mayor’s campaigns is not in a position to hand out 30-year tax breaks. Before the IDA approves one more PILOT, it owes Mount Vernon an explanation of how it got this one so wrong.

The letter frames this as a modest, well-structured proposal modeled on Yonkers. It lists fiscal pressures, mentions austerity measures already taken, and cites the Governor’s encouragement for cities to find new revenue. It even includes a brief section acknowledging potential downsides.

What the letter does not include is any discussion of whether this proposal is legal.

That’s a significant omission. Because there are real constitutional problems with what’s being proposed, and the mayor’s office either knows about them and chose not to mention them, or doesn’t know about them and didn’t bother to check. Neither option inspires confidence.

The Yonkers Comparison Is Wrong

The mayor’s letter leans heavily on Yonkers as a model. The implication is straightforward: Yonkers does it, it works, we should do it too.

There’s a problem. Yonkers does not have a commuter-only tax. Yonkers has a city income tax that applies to both residents and nonresidents. Residents pay an income tax surcharge of 16.75% of their New York State tax liability. Nonresidents pay a 0.50% earnings tax on wages earned in the city. Both groups pay. That’s the entire point.

What the mayor is proposing is something different: a tax that falls exclusively on nonresidents while residents pay nothing comparable. That distinction is not a technicality. It’s the difference between a tax structure that has survived legal challenge and one the U.S. Supreme Court has already struck down.

The Constitutional Problem the Mayor Didn’t Mention

In Austin v. New Hampshire (1975), the U.S. Supreme Court struck down New Hampshire’s Commuters Income Tax because it fell exclusively on the income of nonresidents and was not offset by comparable taxes on residents. The Court held that this violated the Privileges and Immunities Clause of Article IV of the Constitution, which prohibits states from discriminating against citizens of other states in their ability to earn a livelihood.

The parallel to what Mount Vernon is proposing is direct. A commuter tax that applies only to nonresidents, with no comparable income tax on residents, is the same structure the Court found unconstitutional in Austin. If a commuter from Connecticut or New Jersey working in Mount Vernon files a challenge, Austin is a direct bar. Full stop.

There’s a wrinkle worth noting. The Privileges and Immunities Clause protects citizens of other states, not necessarily residents of other municipalities within New York. So if the tax only hit commuters from, say, New Rochelle or White Plains, Austin‘s precise hook might not apply. But that doesn’t solve the problem. The Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, and the New York State Constitution, would still require a rational basis for taxing commuters while exempting residents earning the same wages in the same city. Courts have generally been skeptical of pure residence-based distinctions in local income taxes, and for good reason.

None of this analysis appears in the mayor’s letter. Not a word about Austin. Not a word about the Privileges and Immunities Clause. Not a word about Equal Protection. The letter asks the City Council to formally request state legislation authorizing a tax structure with known constitutional defects, without disclosing those defects.

The State Authorization Problem

Before any of the constitutional analysis matters, there’s a threshold question: New York municipalities don’t have inherent taxing power. They can only impose taxes the state legislature explicitly authorizes. Yonkers has a city income tax because Albany gave Yonkers that authority. New York City has its structure because of its special charter and state law. Mount Vernon would need the state legislature to act first.

Albany has historically been reluctant to expand local income tax authority outside of New York City. The word from Albany, relayed by people who would know, is that this proposal is dead on arrival. The reasons are practical: authorizing one city to impose a commuter-only tax would set a precedent that any municipality in New York could follow. Every city, town, and village could start taxing workers who commute in from somewhere else. In a state where people routinely live and work in different municipalities, that’s an inflationary feeding frenzy nobody in state government wants to trigger, least of all Governor Hochul, who is running for re-election and has no interest in adding new taxes to an already crushing cost of living in the New York metro area.

There’s also the matter of representation. State legislators from New Rochelle, Yonkers, Bronxville, Pelham, and every other community whose residents commute into Mount Vernon would be voting on whether to let Mount Vernon tax their constituents. Good luck with that.

The Practical Problems

Set aside the legal questions for a moment. Even if this proposal were constitutional and Albany were willing, the policy itself is counterproductive.

Mount Vernon badly needs business development. The city needs employers to locate here, expand here, and hire here. A commuter tax tells every business considering Mount Vernon that their employees will face an additional payroll burden for the privilege of showing up to work. It tells every worker considering a job in Mount Vernon that they’d be better off taking the same job in New Rochelle or Yonkers or the Bronx, where no such tax exists. In a competitive labor market, that’s a self-inflicted wound.

Then there are the city’s own employees. A large percentage of Mount Vernon’s police officers, firefighters, and teachers live outside the city. A commuter tax on those workers would immediately become a labor relations issue. Public employee unions would demand salary adjustments to offset the tax, and they’d have leverage to get them. The net revenue gain to the city could be partially or entirely consumed by higher labor costs. You’d be taxing your own workforce to pay your own workforce more. It’s a fiscal hamster wheel.

And then there’s reciprocity. Thousands of Mount Vernon residents commute to jobs in surrounding communities. What prevents those communities from doing the same thing? If Mount Vernon can tax New Rochelle residents who work here, why can’t New Rochelle tax Mount Vernon residents who work there? The mayor’s letter doesn’t address this, probably because the answer is obvious and unhelpful.

Blaming Outsiders for an Inside Job

The underlying logic of the proposal raises additional questions. The framing goes something like this: Mount Vernon is being exploited by outsiders. Commuters come here, use our roads, benefit from our police and fire services, and take their money home to spend in their own communities. They’re profiting from Mount Vernon without paying their fair share.

This is a familiar political move: find an external group , blame them for fiscal problems they didn’t cause, and propose taking their money to fill a hole created by your own mismanagement. It’s the politics of scapegoating, and it has a long, ugly history at every level of American government.

Mount Vernon’s fiscal crisis was not caused by a New Rochelle resident who teaches at a Mount Vernon school. It was not caused by a Yonkers resident who works at a Mount Vernon business. It was caused by years of mismanagement, uncontrolled spending, nepotism, deferred maintenance, missing audits, and a political culture that treats the city budget as a patronage fund. We’ve documented this extensively.

The city has already raised property taxes. It has introduced garbage and sewer fees that were previously covered by property taxes. It has raised building department fees. Residents are paying more and getting less. Instead of addressing the spending side of the equation with real reform, city officials keep finding new pockets to pick. The commuter tax proposal is the latest entry in that pattern: don’t fix the dysfunction, just find someone new to pay for it.

What the Council Should Do

Before the City Council takes any action on this request, it should demand a legal opinion from the Corporation Counsel on the constitutionality of a commuter-only tax under Austin v. New Hampshire and the Equal Protection Clause. That opinion should be made public. If the mayor’s office already has a legal opinion, the Council should ask why it wasn’t included in the letter.

The Council should also ask a simpler question: has anyone in city government spoken with Assemblyman Pretlow or Senator Stewart-Cousins about whether this legislation has any realistic chance of passing in Albany?

Because spending political capital on a proposal that is both legally dubious and legislatively impossible is not governing. It’s theater.

Related Reading:

We Met with Assemblyman Pretlow About Mount Vernon’s Fiscal Emergency

The Austerity Budget That Wasn’t

MVCIP Fiscal Oversight Report (PDF)

Austin v. New Hampshire, 420 U.S. 656 (1975) – Full Opinion

What it did not include was a single word about the financial emergency threatening to bankrupt this city within two years.

State of the City addresses are usually political theater. Nobody expects forensic accounting. But there is a difference between the normal polish of political performance and a speech that actively contradicts the documented reality residents live every day. Patterson-Howard’s address crossed that line.

Residents see cracked sidewalks, closed storefronts, and property tax bills that have risen over 40% in five years. They were told they were witnessing “transformation.” They were told the city is “not raising taxes to survive” but “generating revenue to thrive.” They were told the police department deserves applause. They were told the building department is now “modern” and “data-driven.”

None of that holds up. Let’s go through what the mayor said, and what she left out.

The Financial Emergency No One Mentioned

The single most important fact about Mount Vernon went completely unaddressed: the city is broke.

Comptroller Darren Morton has publicly warned that Mount Vernon could face insolvency within two years. At a recent Board of Estimates and Contracts meeting, he flagged that 2025 actuals were running $4 million short of projections. The city has no bond rating (withdrawn in January 2019 and never restored). It has no reserve funds. It has not completed an audit since 2020. It borrows through tax anticipation notes, essentially municipal payday loans, just to keep the lights on.

Three months before the State of the City, in December 2025, the NYS Comptroller issued a follow-up report revisiting 11 recommendations from a 2020 audit of the city’s financial reporting and oversight. The results: three implemented, four partially implemented, four not implemented. The findings read like a catalog of institutional failure.

The city still has no multiyear financial or capital plans. The Council President told auditors that without a credit rating, the city simply cannot do long-term planning. Budgets were adopted 13 to 85 days late over five years. Revenue was overestimated by $8.8 million in 2023 and $13.1 million in 2024. The overtime appropriation in 2024 was underestimated by $4.1 million, a 180% miss. The Comptroller’s own office has not filed Annual Financial Reports for 2021 through 2024; those filings are between 225 and 1,321 days late.

The mayor did not mention any of this.

Property taxes have risen 44% faster than inflation since 2001. The City Council has overridden the state tax cap in 11 of the last 15 years, adding a cumulative 34.73% above the allowable levy. The 2026 budget includes another 5.47% increase. Sales tax revenue has fallen 7% in two years while every neighboring city grew. The city is sitting on $60 million in unpaid property taxes it can’t or won’t collect.

We’ve documented this fiscal emergency in detail and presented it directly to state legislators. The NYS Comptroller has confirmed years of financial failures. The mayor’s response? “We’re not raising taxes to survive. We’re growing revenue to thrive.”

The state’s own auditors say the city can’t produce a reliable budget, can’t complete an audit, and can’t tell taxpayers whether the deficit is getting better or worse. That’s not thriving. That’s a city running on fumes and pretending the tank is full.

“Crime Is Down” — Until You Look at What Just Happened

The mayor celebrated 365 days without a gun-related homicide. She thanked the police department for its “dedication.”

Just days earlier, Mount Vernon Detective Kyren Braunskill, 34, had been arrested by the Suffolk County DA. He’d been promoted to detective on March 19. By March 26, he was in handcuffs, named in a 57-count indictment alleging he funneled guns to Long Island gang members tied to two murders, eight armed robberies, and five shootings. Braunskill had been on a state decertification list after being fired as a probationary corrections officer in 2020. The department hired him anyway. In September 2024, they named him Cop of the Month.

This isn’t an isolated incident. In October 2025, five officers were suspended after a prisoner smuggled a loaded revolver into a transport van and shot another detainee during transport. The gun should have been found during booking. The department’s own statement admitted the firearm “should have been detected during arrest or intake.”

In December 2024, the U.S. Department of Justice found a pattern of excessive force, unlawful arrests, and illegal strip and body cavity searches after a three-year investigation. Officers strip-searched nearly every person arrested until at least fall 2022. Two women, ages 65 and 75, arrested on fabricated drug charges, were strip-searched; an internal investigation found the officers had lied, and their punishment was losing a few vacation days. In one case, a resident was charged with selling drugs in Mount Vernon while he was actually in North Carolina, confirmed by Instagram posts, bus receipts, and browser history.

The mayor acknowledged the DOJ investigation in December. At the State of the City, she didn’t mention it.

And that “365 days without a gun-related homicide”? Lisa Grier, 33 was beaten to death with a hammer inside her East 4th Street apartment on March 21, days before the address. The mayor’s carefully worded metric (“gun related deaths”) allowed her to skip past the fact that a woman was murdered in her own home in Mount Vernon the same week.

The Building Department: “Modern and Data-Driven”?

The mayor described the building department as a transformed operation issuing permits in five to seven days. She introduced “Lucky,” an AI chatbot.

In April 2024, the New York State Department of State issued findings documenting systemic failures: backlogged permits, understaffing, city codes not updated in 30 years, and a failure to conduct required annual fire inspections of schools, houses of worship, and multi-family residences going back to 2009. Records were missing. Violations had no follow-up. The state threatened to hand code enforcement to Westchester County if improvements weren’t made by August.

That threat, not internal initiative, drove whatever changes followed. Residents have been documenting their struggles with this department for years. Calling it “modern” and “data-driven” isn’t transformation. It’s rebranding.

$44.4 Million in Tax Revenue, Gone

The mayor touted residential development. She mentioned MacQuesten Parkway and Vernon Commons. She talked about “diverse housing opportunities.”

What she didn’t say: the Mount Vernon Industrial Development Agency, the driver of housing development, has handed out $44.4 million in tax breaks over the past decade, collecting only $15.9 million in return. The school district lost $26.7 million. The city lost $13.3 million. And 67% of the IDA’s portfolio is low-income housing that generates zero sales tax and virtually no permanent jobs.

The flagship project at 115 South MacQuesten tells the story. The developer invests 6% of project costs, collects a fee worth 168% of that investment, and gets a 30-year tax abatement. The developer’s political operative was the mayor’s chief fundraiser. Campaign contributions from connected parties total $25,050. The abatement is worth $15.3 million. A 600-to-1 return. When a resident asked the mayor to recuse herself, her response was: “Sue me.”

Sales tax revenue, the clearest indicator of commercial health, has fallen 7% in two years. The gap with New Rochelle widened from $9.3 million in 2016 to $15.7 million in 2025. If IDA tax breaks were generating growth, that gap should be closing. It’s accelerating.

Five Years to Fix an Overpass

The mayor celebrated bridge reopenings. The Fulton Avenue and South Street MTA bridges, closed since 2022, have been rebuilt. Credit where it’s due; that was funded primarily through MTA and state partnerships.

But the Fulton Avenue overpass, the one that matters most for daily south side traffic, remains closed. It was shut down in January 2023. At the State of the City, the mayor said “yesterday we met with engineers to select a design” — convenient timing. Projected reopening: fall 2027. That’s nearly five years closed.

The Comprehensive Plan: Already in Court

The mayor touted the city’s first comprehensive plan in 55 years. She left out the part where residents immediately sued to void it. An Article 78 lawsuit filed by four residents, including a professional planner with 40 years of experience, alleges the City Council failed to provide meaningful public participation, withheld the full plan before hearings, and skipped required environmental review under SEQRA. We covered the underlying problems when the plan was released.

The Sewer “Success” Story

The mayor claimed sewer backups are down 95%. But she recently stated that only $25M of $150M of New York State sewer grants were spent so far. Did those $25M fix 95% of the problem?

Generally, any reduction is welcome. But the city still hasn’t openly addressed what happened in Hunts Woods, where residents fought for years to get the city to acknowledge a crisis the administration denied.

“Rewriting Narratives”

The mayor said Mount Vernon is “rewriting narratives.” She framed criticism as “misconceptions, myths, and sometimes outright disinformation.”

This is a pattern. When watchdog organizations publish documented, sourced criticism, the administration labels it misinformation. The mayor doesn’t engage with the data. She doesn’t contest the numbers. She reframes the act of criticism itself as the problem.

Residents don’t need better narratives. They need completed audits. A bond rating. A building department that doesn’t require state intervention. A police department that doesn’t hire from decertification lists. An IDA that doesn’t hand $44.4 million to developers while the school district, the most fiscally distressed in New York State, loses $26.7 million.

They got none of that on March 31. They got a prayer, a campaign video, and an hour of claims that collapse under the weight of public records.

Sidenote: The Production Itself

A small thing, but telling. The video of the State of the City address itself is a dumpster fire. The first 20 minutes of the broadcast are a static title card. The audio sometimes plays through one channel only. The mayor’s microphone cuts out repeatedly. Speakers are never identified. Sound clips and distorts. The video randomly jumps to title cards mid-sentence.

As of this writing, the video has been viewed about 500 times. Mount Vernon has a population the mayor claims is nearly 100,000.

The Reality Check

The mayor closed by telling Mount Vernon to “step into the future.” The future she didn’t mention is the one where the comptroller says the city could be bankrupt within two years.

Spin and flowery narratives don’t change that. Audits do. Oversight does. Accountability does.

None of those made it into the speech.

Watch the full 2026 State of the City address:
https://www.youtube.com/live/IJIp2aQQ7Wk

We were told the finances were dire. We were told restraint was necessary. We were told taxes had to go up because the City was broke and that an “austerity framework” would impose discipline on spending.

And then, almost immediately, the exceptions started.

So let’s call this what it is: the austerity budget was not austerity. It was branding.

A slogan. A talking point. A shield used to sell pain to taxpayers while preserving discretion for City Hall.

One recent email exchange with Comptroller Darren Morton — who, word on the street has it, thinks he’s going to be the next mayor — says the quiet part out loud.

In January, residents objected to discretionary travel being approved just weeks into the fiscal year. The argument was simple: if the City is truly in financial distress, travel should be limited to what is essential, mandatory, or contractually required. That is what residents were led to believe the framework meant. Morton responded at the time by assuring the public that the framework did not permit unrestricted or discretionary travel, and that formal protocols were being developed to ensure requests were evaluated under a heightened standard.

That sounded reassuring.

But by late March, when residents again challenged a travel request for Planning Commissioner James Rausse to attend a national conference in Detroit, the standard had changed. Or rather, the reality had become harder to hide.

Now the explanation was that online training is generally more cost-efficient, yes, but in-person training can sometimes offer additional value. Now the issue was no longer whether travel was essential or mandatory, but whether officials could describe it as useful. Now a “national conference” complete with networking and travel was being defended as a “consolidated training opportunity.”

That is not austerity.

That is a loophole wide enough to drive a city vehicle through.

The problem here is not just one $2,500 trip. It is the bait-and-switch.

Taxpayers were sold a story of discipline. They were told the City had entered a new era of hard choices. But when it came time to apply those hard choices to itself, City Hall reverted to the same old game: define the rule broadly, define the exception even more broadly, and then pretend the public is too unsophisticated to notice the difference.

Residents noticed.

They asked the obvious questions. What specific deficiency is this expense addressing? What measurable outcome justifies it? What exactly cannot be learned through lower-cost alternatives? What accountability follows after attendance? Will there be a report? A deliverable? A measurable benefit to taxpayers?

Those are not unreasonable questions. They are the bare minimum questions any serious austerity regime would ask before approving discretionary spending.

And yet even Morton, in his March 26 response, effectively conceded the point. He acknowledged that residents were right to demand a clearly defined purpose, identification of the specific need being addressed, measurable outcomes, and accountability following attendance. He admitted those were “reasonable expectations” and said he would discuss them as part of a “more structured and transparent review process.”

Think about that.

The Comptroller was defending a travel expense under an austerity framework while simultaneously admitting that the standards residents were demanding still needed to be discussed as part of some future process.

So what exactly was the framework?

Because if the rules were not clear enough to require a defined purpose, measurable outcomes, and post-attendance accountability before the expense was approved, then the so-called framework was never a framework at all. It was window dressing.

That is why this matters.

The issue is not merely whether one conference might have some professional value. Of course conferences can have value. The issue is whether City Hall should be indulging discretionary travel while telling residents to accept higher taxes, deteriorating services, and endless warnings about financial distress.

Mount Vernon residents are not stupid. They understand that every single questionable expense may be survivable on its own. That is how governments get away with waste. It is always “just” a few thousand here, “just” a conference there, “just” one more exception. But the cumulative message is unmistakable: austerity for taxpayers, flexibility for officials.

That is the breach of trust.

And it gets worse. Because once officials establish that a travel request need only be described in sufficiently vague language about training, value, networking, or city priorities, then the entire restraint narrative collapses. Every expense becomes defensible. Every trip can be reframed as worthwhile. Every exception becomes precedent.

Which means this will happen again.

Unencumbered.

Unless residents keep exposing it.

The City cannot have it both ways. It cannot declare financial emergency, raise taxes, invoke austerity, and then act as though ordinary standards of proof do not apply when officials want to spend public money on discretionary travel. If austerity means anything, it means saying no to things that may be useful but are not necessary. If every “beneficial” expense survives review, then austerity is a sham.

And that is exactly what taxpayers are looking at.

Not a serious system of fiscal discipline. Not a meaningful check on discretionary spending. Just another familiar Mount Vernon performance: stern language for the public, elastic standards for government, and an expectation that no one will connect the dots.

They did.

And they should keep doing it.

Because if this kind of fakery goes unchallenged, the “austerity budget” will become what so many City Hall promises become in Mount Vernon: a joke on taxpayers.

A proposal before the Mount Vernon Board of Estimate and Contract would authorize $85,546.99 in taxpayer funds, without public bidding, for traffic signalization improvements tied to the 42 West Broad Street development.

The work is being labeled an “emergency.”

It isn’t.

Two Statements — One Problem

In correspondence to City officials, Vincent J. Ferrandino, the City Council’s former review consultant for the project (and Mount Vernon resident), states that escrow funds exist for 42 West Broad intended to cover these improvements.

Separately, a previously reported $500,000 “42 Broad community benefit” appears to have been removed or reclassified in City financials, with similar funds now listed under “custodial accounts” — without any 42 Broad designation.

So:

• If funds were set aside, why are they no longer clearly accounted for?
• Why are they absent from the current proposal?
• If they exist, why are taxpayers being charged instead?
• If they don’t, where did they go?

Where’s the money?

The Resolution — and the Omission That Matters

The resolution referred from the City Council:

• Authorizes $85,546.99 in taxpayer funds
• Proceeds without competitive bidding
• Labels the work an “emergency”
• Makes no reference to escrow, community benefit, or project-specific funds

That omission is not technical — it is the issue.

Where’s the money?

The “Emergency” That Took a Decade

Traffic impacts from 42 West Broad were identified years ago during Planning Board approval. As standard, those impacts were to be addressed through developer-funded improvements, typically secured through escrow.

Now, nearly a decade later, the City calls it an “emergency.”

It wasn’t addressed in February.
It wasn’t addressed last year.
It wasn’t addressed at any point in the intervening decade.

This is not an emergency. It is delayed accountability.

And, as seen before — including the use of our ARPA funds to demolish the family home of now First Deputy Comptroller Condell Hamilton — the “emergency” label is again being used to bypass financial safeguards designed to protect taxpayer dollars.

Missing Accountability

The Building and Planning Departments — responsible for enforcing site plan conditions — are notably absent from this discussion.

Before any vote, the resolution must be amended to:

• Identify available escrow funds
• Require their use first
• Prevent shifting developer obligations onto taxpayers

Anything less is a failure of basic oversight.

The Real Question

This is not about one $85,546.99 expenditure.

It is about whether funds collected for a specific purpose are:

• Tracked
• Preserved
• Used as intended

Or quietly redirected while taxpayers are billed again. This is also something we’ve seen before. When money meant to pay our first responders was quietly moved into a contingency line and later used to fund 40-50% raises for elected and appointed officials.

Same people. Same pattern. Same questions.

Where’s our money?

The Bottom Line

Before any vote, the City must answer a simple question:

Where is the escrow money tied to 42 West Broad — and why isn’t it being used?

Until then, Mount Vernon residents are left asking what they’ve had to ask far too often:

Where did our money go?!

This is a story about what grows when accountability disappears.

There are two 501(c)(3) nonprofits operating out of Room 11 at Mount Vernon City Hall. They share the same address, overlapping officers, and a board composed almost entirely of city employees. One uses the Recreation Department’s phone number. The other has the city’s Commissioner of Recreation and Commissioner of Public Works written into its bylaws as permanent board members. And in 2024, the City of Mount Vernon issued one of them $60,000 in federal pandemic relief funds, with checks approved by the same man who runs both organizations.

The first is called Friends of Mount Vernon Arts, Recreation and Youth Programs Inc. (Friends of MVARYP, EIN 90-0910967). The second is the Mount Vernon Memorial Field Foundation, Inc. (MVMFF, EIN 47-1292288). Both have websites that show very little meaningful information.

What follows is what the public records show.

THE CONTEXT: A CITY THAT STOPPED REPORTING

In September 2020, State Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli released an audit of Mount Vernon’s financial reporting and oversight. City officials had not established basic financial policies or procedures. The City Comptroller failed to file the required annual financial report for fiscal years 2016 through 2019. No audited financial statements had been issued since 2015. The city had lost its credit rating.

In January 2022, a second state audit found millions in expenses not timely paid, inappropriate actions by the former city comptroller, and poor disclosure that caused ongoing legal issues. The state made 29 recommendations. DiNapoli urged Mayor Patterson-Howard and the incoming City Comptroller, Darren Morton, to implement them immediately.

As of the state’s most recent follow-up, the City’s 2021 through 2024 audits remain outstanding. The general fund deficit, last measured at $28.9 million as of December 2020, has likely grown. The city still cannot tell its own residents what its finances look like.

This is the environment in which Friends of MVARYP received $60,000 in federal money, and in which two city-run nonprofits operate out of the same room in City Hall.

THE FIRST NONPROFIT: FRIENDS OF MVARYP

Friends of MVARYP was incorporated in 2012 and received 501(c)(3) status in 2014. It operates out of City Hall, uses the Recreation Department’s phone line, and reports revenue of $300,856 for fiscal year 2024. Based on its IRS Form 990-EZ filings (available on ProPublica) and city employment records, here is its board:

Eight of nine board members are current city employees or elected officials. This is not a community organization with some government ties. It is city government running a private fundraising vehicle, one that answers to no city council, no budget hearing, no public vote, and no FOIL request.

THE SECOND NONPROFIT: MOUNT VERNON MEMORIAL FIELD FOUNDATION

Friends of MVARYP is not the only nonprofit operating out of Room 11.

The Mount Vernon Memorial Field Foundation, Inc. (MVMFF) was incorporated on April 3, 2014, under Section 402 of the New York Not-for-Profit Corporation Law. Its Certificate of Incorporation was filed by Darren M. Morton. Its stated purpose: to provide financial and programmatic support for the preservation, renovation, and operation of Memorial Field.

On June 5, 2024, Morton signed the organization’s Registration Statement for Charitable Organizations (CHAR410) with the New York State Attorney General’s Charities Bureau, listing himself as President and primary contact. The registration was received July 16, 2024. The foundation is registered under NY State Reg. No. 50-30-94, with its principal address at 1 Roosevelt Square, Suite 11, the same room in City Hall where Friends of MVARYP operates.

The registration lists three officers:

Every officer of the Memorial Field Foundation also serves on the board of Friends of MVARYP. All three are city employees or elected officials.

The overlap does not end with shared personnel. The MVMFF bylaws structurally embed city government into the nonprofit’s leadership: Section 6.1 mandates that the board include “the City of Mt. Vernon Commissioner of Recreation and Commissioner of Department of Public Works.” Section 6.2 confirms these commissioners serve “by appointment to the respective City office,” not by election. This is not informal overlap. It is a permanent feature of the organization’s charter.

The foundation’s Certificate of Incorporation designates process service at One Roosevelt Square, Room 11, City Hall. Its contact email is Morton’s personal Gmail.

One additional detail: according to the CHAR410, MVMFF’s federal tax-exempt status was revoked on May 17, 2017. The registration was filed June 5, 2024, seven years after revocation. Whether this represents a re-application or a registration of an organization operating without tax-exempt status is not clear from the public record.

Two nonprofits. Same City Hall address. Same president. Same treasurer. Overlapping boards. City commissioners written into the bylaws.

No resident voted for this. No city council authorized it. No public hearing examined it.

THE FEDERAL MONEY

In May 2024, Mayor Shawyn Patterson-Howard signed a formal ARPA subrecipient contract awarding Friends of MVARYP $60,000 in federal pandemic relief funds. The nonprofit was represented at signing by Kathleen Walker-Pinckney, the city’s own Recreation Commissioner, acting as the nonprofit’s Vice-President. The city’s Department of Planning and Community Development administered the contract.

The city issued two checks from the Office of the Comptroller: $30,000 on July 15, 2024 (Check No. 160381), and $30,000 on October 8, 2024 (Check No. 161390). Both payable to Friends of MVARYP at 1 Roosevelt Square, Room 11, City Hall. Payment vouchers require Comptroller approval.

The Comptroller is Darren Morton. The President of Friends of MVARYP is Darren Morton. The President of the Memorial Field Foundation is also Darren Morton. His office approved disbursements to an organization he leads, while simultaneously leading a second nonprofit out of the same office.

The contract’s Section 16, Conflict of Interest, states:

“The Subrecipient warrants that no part of the total Contract Amount shall be paid, directly or indirectly to an employee or official of the City/County as wages, compensation or gifts.”

The nonprofit’s board is composed almost entirely of city employees and officials. The contract contains a clause it cannot truthfully sign, and the city signed it anyway.

THE FIRE RELIEF SOLICITATION

On November 24, 2025, a fire tore through a residential building at 30 Cottage Avenue in Mount Vernon. Mayor Patterson-Howard responded on her official city Facebook page, directing all monetary donations to Friends of MVARYP, with Zelle payments to Accounting@friendsofmountvernon.org. Gift cards were to be dropped at the Office of the Mayor.

Click here for full-size image

No independent charity. No escrow account. No public accounting. The mayor used the authority of her office to channel disaster relief donations into a nonprofit controlled by city hall employees. As of publication, no accounting of those funds has been made public.

THE CITY COUNCIL WAS ASKED TO BLESS IT

On the evening of March 9, 2026, the Mount Vernon City Council held a work session. Item 12 on the referral packet read:

“An Ordinance Authorizing Continued Co-Sponsorship between the Mount Vernon Recreation Department, Youth Bureau, and Friends of Mount Vernon Arts, Recreation & Youth Programs, Inc. for Community Programming and Special Events.”

The attached letter, submitted by Commissioner Walker-Pinckney and Executive Director Burrell-Butler, requests Council approval of a formal, ongoing agreement allowing the nonprofit to “accept monetary donations to continue funding special events hosted by the Recreation and Youth Bureau Departments.” The stated reason: “current budget constraints.”

That is a direct, written admission that Friends of MVARYP exists to move public-purpose money outside the budget process, bypassing city council appropriations, public hearings, and Freedom of Information Law.

The co-sponsorship request was submitted on Friends of MVARYP letterhead, but that letterhead lists the city’s own website (cmvny.com), the Recreation Department’s Facebook page, and the Recreation Department’s phone and fax numbers. The nonprofit has no independent institutional identity. The signatories used their government titles: Walker-Pinckney signed as “Commissioner,” Burrell-Butler as “Executive Director.” City officials using government authority to advocate for a contract between the city and a nonprofit they lead is a textbook Public Officers Law §74 conflict, documented, signed, and submitted to a legislative body.

Click here to see the full referral and letter.

And the word “continued” is telling. They are not asking to create this relationship. They are asking the Council to formalize one that has already been running without legislative authorization.

Approval does not shield anyone from legal exposure. But it creates institutional cover and makes future accountability harder.

THE INSTITUTIONAL FAILURE

Think about how many hands this agenda item passed through before it reached the public. Someone drafted the letter. Someone formatted it on nonprofit letterhead listing city phone numbers. Someone packaged it into the referral packet. Someone assigned it an item number. Someone distributed it to Council members. Someone posted the agenda.

At every step, a city employee had the opportunity to say: wait a minute. A nonprofit run entirely by city employees, operating out of City Hall, using city phone lines, chaired by the city’s own Comptroller, is asking the Council to authorize it to raise money for city programs outside the budget. The letter is signed by two department heads using their government titles. The word “continued” tells you this has been running without authorization.

Nobody stopped it. Nobody flagged it. Nobody said this needs legal review before it goes to a vote.

That silence is not a procedural lapse. It is an institutional failure. The systems meant to catch conflicts of interest, to ensure public money moves through public processes, to protect taxpayers from self-dealing, have either broken down or were never functioning.

The individual conflicts in this article are serious. But an entire administrative apparatus processing this referral without a single objection may be the most damning detail of all. It suggests the arrangement is not being hidden. It is simply normal. The people inside City Hall do not see the problem, because the problem is the culture they work in every day.

WHAT THIS MEANS

New York Public Officers Law §74 prohibits public employees from engaging in activities that create a substantial conflict with their official duties. Federal ARPA regulations under 2 CFR §200.318 require conflict of interest disclosures and prohibit officials from participating in grants in which they have a personal interest. The city administered $60,000 in federal money through an arrangement that violates the plain terms of both standards.

Mount Vernon spent years unable to account for public money. The state documented the failures. Officials promised reform. And while reform was being promised, while the audits remained unfinished and the credit rating stayed suspended, city officials were building a parallel financial structure: two nonprofits, same City Hall office, same leadership, funded first by private donations, then by federal ARPA funds, and potentially to be formally ratified by the City Council as standard operating procedure.

Mount Vernon residents deserve a government that spends public money in public. What is described here is the opposite of that.

The conversation was direct. Mount Vernon is not experiencing a one-year budget problem. The city has no bond rating, no completed audits since 2020, no reserve funds, and over $60 million in unpaid property taxes. Property taxes have risen more than 40% over the last five years while city services have declined. The City Comptroller has warned that insolvency is possible within two years.

This is not news to Albany. The New York State Comptroller’s office has audited Mount Vernon’s finances multiple times and found serious failures each time. A 2020 audit found that the city had not filed required annual financial reports for fiscal years 2016 through 2019, had produced no audited financial statements since 2015, and had lost its credit rating as a result. A follow-up audit released in January 2022 documented 29 separate recommendations to overhaul the city comptroller’s office, after finding unauthorized electronic disbursements totaling $16.4 million, millions in unpaid bills, and a near-total absence of financial controls. The state has flagged these problems. The city has not fixed them.

Assemblyman Pretlow indicated he is well aware of Mount Vernon’s financial condition. He expressed support for the concept of a state financial monitor and stated that if the Mount Vernon City Council passed a resolution requesting one, he would champion it at the state level.

That last part matters.

A state financial monitor cannot be imposed from Albany without local action first. Under New York’s home rule framework, the City Council must move first. A council resolution requesting state oversight would give the Assemblyman the political and procedural footing to act.

This is now a question for Mount Vernon’s elected council members.

MVCIP’s position is straightforward: the city’s fiscal problems are structural, not cyclical. They will not resolve themselves through another tax increase or another year of delayed audits. Meaningful oversight, with real authority and clear exit conditions, is what a responsible path forward looks like.

We will be bringing this message directly to city council members in the weeks ahead. We encourage residents to do the same.

Download our full report on the fiscal emergency in Mount Vernon here.

It is reflected in the 5.5% property tax increase, the consistent appearance of new fees, the current fees that multiply with every tax bill, and a municipal budget that shows a city spending roughly two dollars for every dollar it brings in. It is visible in aging infrastructure, flooding, deteriorating buildings, and departments that struggle to deliver basic services.

Against that backdrop, the City’s recent spending decisions deserve scrutiny.

$20,800 in Conference Travel

At the March 3 meeting of the Board of Estimate & Contract, the City approved five out-of-town conference trips totaling $13,800.

Those approvals follow another $7,000 in conference travel approved the previous month.

In two months, that is $20,800 in conference travel.

All approved unanimously. With virtually no discussion. Comptroller Darren Morton asked a few questions — but in the end, he did what he always does…

The “Free” Trip That Isn’t Free

One of the approved trips sends the Building Commissioner, Patrick Holder, to Las Vegas for four days to attend the Laserfiche Empower Conference at the Mandalay Bay Resort.

City officials noted that conference registration is covered by a third party. That does not make the trip free — far from it.

The City is still paying his salary, benefits, travel and lodging, and four days of lost work time.

The Building Department

The Las Vegas trip is particularly offensive given the condition of Mount Vernon’s Building Department, which residents and contractors regularly describe as a Kafkaesque nightmare.

• Permits routinely sit for months or years. I have personally been waiting an obscene amount of time to close a simple solar permit.
• Code enforcement is nearly nonexistent, and what enforcement does occur is wildly inconsistent.
• Buildings across Mount Vernon are literally falling apart. Just recently, a hole was discovered — by a resident — in the top deck of the Sidney Avenue parking garage, forcing part of the structure to close.
• And the Building Department itself — with its yellowed, crumbling, mold-infested walls — is a disgusting symbol of the City’s neglect. The condition of the office perfectly reflects the condition of the system it runs.

Under these circumstances, sending the department head — or any department employee — across the country to a resort conference in Las Vegas is not just inappropriate, it is outrageous. And it is one more slap in the face to the hardworking Mount Vernon taxpayers who are expected to foot the bill for a government that cannot even perform its most basic functions.

The Building Commissioner — especially this Building Commissioner — should be in the office fixing the department, not flying to Nevada for a four-day resort junket. The Building Department already has a Laserfiche contract. What it does not have is a functioning operation. And even if that conference offered something of genuine value, Laserfiche is records management software — not a tool the Building Commissioner should be running or overseeing in the first place. This is not a trip that required the commissioner. It was a trip the commissioner decided to take.

A Convenient Loophole

Another approved trip highlights a structural issue.

The Board of Water Supply received approval for a conference in Charlotte, North Carolina, on the ground that it operates outside the City’s austerity review protocols.

If austerity is real, however, it should apply everywhere our tax dollars are used, and the Board of Water Supply is most certainly wetting their beaks. In fact, Mount Vernon water bills just recently increased.

Austerity measures should apply not only to the Board of Water Supply, but also to the Mount Vernon Urban Renewal Agency and the Mount Vernon Industrial Development Agency.

At present, it does not. What sense does that make?

Meanwhile . . . a Portrait Ceremony

While approving travel under an austerity budget, the City is also planning a ceremony to unveil a portrait of former Comptroller Maureen Walker later this month.

That raises a simple question: Who is paying for the portrait?

If taxpayer funds are involved, residents deserve to know.

The ceremony also carries a certain irony.

Former Comptroller Deborah Reynolds has absorbed no shortage of blame over the past six years — from many of the very same officials now organizing this ceremony. But the problems did not start with Reynolds.

Maureen Walker served as Comptroller during former Mayor Ernie Davis’ tenure — a period marked by corruption and fiscal mismanagement that helped set the stage for the crisis Mount Vernon is living through today. The Comptroller’s job is to be a check on exactly that kind of behavior: to watch the books, flag the problems, and protect the public. Walker kept things looking orderly. What she did not do was sound the alarm. Whether she failed to see what was happening, or simply chose not to say anything, the result was the same.

So the ceremony carries a particular irony. The officials who spent years pointing fingers at Reynolds are now unveiling a portrait of the comptroller who came before her — the one who kept things looking fine while the foundation cracked.

So the real question is not simply whether Walker deserves a portrait. The real question is why Mount Vernon keeps honoring the very people who brought it to where it is right now.

This is performative nonsense. And it is exactly what we have come to expect from this administration.

Austerity Means Choices

Austerity is not a slogan. It is a set of priorities.

Mount Vernon residents are paying higher taxes, higher fees, and watching basic services continue to deteriorate.

City Hall is paying for unnecessary conferences, travel, and ceremonies.

If that’s what austerity looks like, it’s no wonder the City’s finances never improve.

This is not about politics, personalities, or one anomalous budget year.

Mount Vernon is in a structural fiscal emergency, and pretending otherwise is no longer just dishonest – it’s dangerous.

For more than a decade, the City has stumbled from crisis to crisis, relying on tax hikes, expensive short-term borrowing, and accounting improvisation to paper over deeper failures. The result is a government that costs more every year, delivers less, and has lost the basic ability to manage its own finances.

At this point, the question is no longer whether Mount Vernon has a problem.

The question is: Why the State is still allowing it to continue?

Financial Distress – In Real Life, In Real Time

Let’s start with the basics.

Large budget-to-actual variances are a classic warning sign of weak financial controls. When projections routinely miss reality by millions of dollars, budgeting stops being planning and becomes theater.

Mount Vernon’s 2024 Budget vs. Actuals reveal that revenues and expenses missed their targets across multiple major categories — not at the margins, but at levels significant enough to reshape the City’s fiscal picture.

The Collapse of the Fund Balance

Mount Vernon’s fund balance — the municipal equivalent of a rainy-day savings account — fell from a healthy surplus in the early 2010s to a deeply negative position by 2019–2020.

A negative fund balance means the City spent money it did not have — not as the product of a single bad year, a recession, or the pandemic — but as the predictable result of years of unrealistic budgets and weak controls in which the budgeting process ceased to function as a real planning tool.

Long-Term Liabilities vs. Net Position

As cash reserves disappeared, long-term obligations moved in the opposite direction.

Mount Vernon’s bonded debt, accrued benefits, and other long-term liabilities rose sharply over the same period that its net position flipped from positive to deeply negative — a clear signal of structural insolvency, not a temporary cash crunch.

In plain terms: Mount Vernon owes far more than it owns, with no credible plan to close the gap.

Taxes Keep Rising, the System Keeps Failing, and the Numbers Don’t Add Up

Years of outsized property tax increases have not stabilized Mount Vernon’s finances. They have concealed deeper failures while shifting more of the burden onto residents.

Since 2012, the City has routinely overridden the state tax cap, exceeding it by a cumulative 34.73%.

Over just the last five years, residents have absorbed more than 40% in cumulative tax increases, including add-on sewer and garbage fees.

Since 2001, Mount Vernon property taxes have risen 44% faster than inflation.

That is not a revenue problem. It is a governance problem.

Missing Bond Rating, Missing Discipline

Despite ever-higher taxes:

• Mount Vernon still has no bond rating
• It holds no meaningful reserves
• Audits after 2020 remain incomplete
• The City continues to rely on tax anticipation notes — essentially high-interest payday loans — just to operate

Higher taxes are not stabilizing the system. They are feeding a cycle of dysfunction.

The Economy Is Sending a Warning

The most overlooked red flag—and one of the clearest—is sales tax.

Over two years, Mount Vernon’s sales tax collections fell by 7%, even as neighboring cities continued to grow. That is not normal volatility — it signals economic stress and declining commercial activity.

This makes Mount Vernon an outlier – and not in a good way.

Sales tax declines mean fewer transactions, fewer customers, and fewer businesses succeeding locally. It’s what happens when a city is unpredictable, poorly managed, and hostile to investment.

You cannot tax your way out of that.

Unpaid Taxes and Selective Enforcement Are Breaking The System

While residents are asked to pay more, the City is sitting on over $60 million in unpaid property taxes.

Repeated tax amnesties have failed. Standard enforcement tools — including foreclosure — have been applied inconsistently or avoided altogether.

The predictable result is a system in which compliant taxpayers subsidize chronic nonpayment, while leadership sidesteps politically difficult decisions.

The administration wants you to cloak its poor choices in the language of compassion; in truth, those decisions amount to fiscal malpractice.

A Missed ARPA Opportunity

The American Rescue Plan Act delivered $41 million to Mount Vernon — a once-in-a-generation chance to stabilize finances and rebuild trust after COVID.

Instead, Mount Vernon’s ARPA spending revealed the same patterns:

• • Weak documentation
  • Emergency-style decision making
  • Minimal transparency
  • Little connection between spending and measurable outcomes

Taken together, these patterns show a system that does not function the way a responsible government should.

That is why the debate cannot be limited to whether particular purchases were technically “allowed.” The real problem is that the City still lacked basic institutional financial controls when they were needed most.

MVCIP’s ARPA series explores how Mount Vernon squandered this opportunity.

Why a State Financial Monitor Is Necessary

Local self-correction is no longer credible.

A state financial monitor is not punishment — it is damage control.

Effective oversight would:

• Enforce timely audits and reporting
• Require a realistic multi-year financial plan
• Review risky borrowing and major contracts
• Mandate a serious tax enforcement strategy
• Restore credibility with residents, vendors, and markets

Oversight should be temporary, enforceable, and benchmark-driven — with clear exit conditions once the City proves it can govern responsibly.

The Time for “Wait and See” Is Over

Mount Vernon’s current trajectory is unsustainable — last-minute budgets, blown tax caps, and manufactured emergencies are not “governance.”

The State must act now: impose oversight, restore basic controls, and protect residents before a preventable crisis becomes irreversible.

*Figures shown are publicly available at mountvernoncitizen.org. Chris McDonough and mountvernoncitizen.org are not affiliated with the Civic Integrity Project.