A 2014 audit by the New York State Office of the State Comptroller found significant deficiencies in how the Mount Vernon Department of Buildings managed fees and fines, including weak oversight of permit collections and a lack of internal controls. The audit found that the department processed roughly 3,150 permits and collected about $881,000 in fees during the audit period, yet lacked the systems to verify that all revenue was properly accounted for.

By 2018, the New York State Senate had taken notice. A state Senate study that year listed Mount Vernon’s Building Department as one of the worst in the state, a damning designation that city officials would later have to publicly acknowledge.

The problems that had been quietly documented in government reports were, by the early 2020s, erupting into public view. Residents described a gauntlet of bureaucracy. Homeowners reported waiting six months to two years just to get a permit, and another year or two to close one out. Others described losing paperwork, losing checks and money orders, and being hit with violations for minor or trivial matters. One resident filed a federal complaint alleging that a building department employee asked him to pay fines in cash and that his property was subjected to harassment including up to 30 inspector visits, some on evenings and holidays.

“If you know the right people, your issues are expedited,” said Matthew Fecteau, an information operations officer in the U.S. Army Reserve, who described the experience as his “living hell.” The city has denied his allegations in court.

A Change.org petition calling for new staff captured the frustration of many: “The home owners, contractors and investors of Mount Vernon are being bullied, mislead, stagnated, losing money and time.”

The Mayor Calls In The State

In August 2023, the Patterson-Howard administration formally called in the New York State Department of State’s Division of Building Standards and Codes to conduct a review of the department’s internal operations. The mayor acknowledged receiving “concerns and complaints” about how the department operates and said that chronic understaffing over the previous decade, outdated codes, and antiquated procedures had produced a backlog of 800 permit applications.

City Communications Director Tim Allen, speaking publicly about the state’s subsequent intervention in 2024, confirmed what many already suspected: a 2018 New York State Senate study had listed Mount Vernon’s Building Department as one of the state’s worst.

The State Steps In

The April 2024 report from the state’s review was blunt. It found backlogged permits, chronic understaffing, outdated city codes, and a failure to conduct timely inspections, including a failure since 2009 to conduct required annual inspections of places of public assembly.

In June 2024, the state escalated. A sternly worded letter from John Addario, Director of Building Standards and Codes for the New York State Department of State, warned Mount Vernon that it “requires that the City give this letter full and immediate attention.” Failure to show measurable progress by mid-August, the letter warned, could lead the state to take over the department entirely, potentially transferring enforcement authority to Westchester County.

The prospect was not hypothetical. In 2021, the state took control of building code enforcement in the village of Spring Valley and handed it to Rockland County, an arrangement that, years later, still shows no end in sight.

Neither outcome materialized in Mount Vernon. The state did not take over, and the city did not demonstrate the kind of compliance the letter demanded. Nearly two years on, residents report that little to nothing has visibly changed. The backlog, the delays, and the dysfunction that prompted the state’s intervention remain part of daily life for homeowners, contractors, and business owners trying to navigate the department.

Now It’s Your Turn

The state came in, issued its warnings, and left without a takeover. Nearly two years later, the department looks much the same as it did before any of it happened.

If you have dealt with the Mount Vernon Department of Buildings, whether as a homeowner, contractor, tenant, or business owner, this survey is your chance to put it on the record. Official reports and state letters have their place, but resident feedback creates a paper trail that is harder to ignore and harder to spin.

The department has a long way to go. Add your voice.

Take the Department of Buildings Customer Satisfaction Survey here.

It is an exclusive “recreational and social” club whose name, branding, and mailing address suggest it belongs to toney Bronxville. For years, and continuing today, the Club has used a Bronxville post office designation, sparing its members the presumably uncomfortable reality that the Bronxville Field Club sits entirely within the City of Mount Vernon.

Physically, legally, and environmentally, it is our neighbor. In practice, however, it has rarely acted like one.

Over the years, the Club has been at the center of repeated controversies: stormwater pushed downhill into Mount Vernon neighborhoods, unpermitted infrastructure, land-use disputes, and litigation triggered whenever regulators or residents pushed back.

Again and again, the pattern has been the same: expand first, deal with the consequences later.

So, when residents raised concerns about yet another expansion, and the Planning Board denied the application after reviewing evidence and public testimony, something unusual happened.

For a brief moment, accountability won.

When Pressure Works, and Money Doesn’t

Rather than accept the decision, the Bronxville Field Club responded the way powerful institutions often do when they encounter resistance: it sued.

What followed were months of closed-door negotiations between the City and the Club – negotiations that deliberately excluded the people most affected by the outcome: Mount Vernon residents living adjacent to the Club’s property and downstream from its impacts.

The proposed solution was a quiet global settlement. Multiple lawsuits would vanish. The Club would receive a fast-tracked path forward. And the City would accept a one-time payment of $450,000 in exchange for ending enforcement and abandoning its litigation posture.

All of this happened without public notice, without public hearings, and without resident participation.

Sunlight Changes the Equation

Once the settlement terms became public, the response was immediate.

MVCIP published the agreement in full. Residents mobilized. Emails flooded inboxes. Phones rang. Planning Board members heard directly from the people who live with flooding, runoff, and infrastructure failures – not from lawyers or lobbyists, but from their neighbors.

And something rare happened in Mount Vernon government.

The Planning Board listened. They pulled the item from the agenda, marking in red that it would not be placed on a future agenda.

This didn’t happen because officials suddenly gained new legal insight. It happened because public pressure made it impossible to pretend this was business as usual.

Transparency changed the outcome.

What This Episode Reveals

After the Planning Board removed discussion of the settlement from its agenda, the Club sent the following message to its membership.

It is telling that, while the Bronxville Field Club was reportedly informing its own stakeholders about the settlement, City Hall was working overtime to keep residents in the dark.

It is also telling that once the deal was exposed to public scrutiny, it could not survive even basic questioning.

Open Meetings Law exists for a reason. Planning Board statutes exist for a reason. They are meant to ensure that decisions affecting neighborhoods, infrastructure, and public trust are made openly, with public participation, not stitched together privately and presented as a fait accompli.

This was not a near miss. It was a case study in how governance fails when officials assume no one is watching.

What MVCIP Sought to Prevent

MVCIP agreed to intervene because this settlement was never about protecting Hunt’s Woods.

It was about shielding City Hall from conflict and shielding the Bronxville Field Club from accountability.

By insisting on transparency, publishing the agreement in full, and centering the voices of downstream neighbors who were deliberately excluded, MVCIP sought to disrupt a backroom deal that traded away public power, narrowed environmental review, and normalized recurring flooding in exchange for a token payment.

The goal was not simply to expose what was being negotiated. It was to reclaim a basic principle: land-use decisions must be driven by evidence, equity, and the lived reality of affected residents, not convenience for officials or certainty for a private club.

Once residents were informed, the response was unified. The deal collapsed under the weight of public scrutiny.

The Real Cost of the Deal Wasn’t $450,000

The true cost of this episode was not the $450,000 payoff. It was the price Mount Vernon paid in squandered resources, lost time, and damaged public trust. The unanswered questions remain.

Public money was spent not to fix flooding or protect neighborhoods, but to negotiate a private retreat – lawyers billing to craft a deal that weakened the City’s own authority. Staff time was diverted from solving real infrastructure problems to managing secrecy, coordinating talking points, and preparing an “executive summary” meant to obscure more than it revealed.

Most damaging of all was the cost to democratic governance. Residents were excluded from decisions that directly affect their homes, safety, and property values, and only learned what was happening because someone inside the process leaked the agreement. That is not how accountable government is supposed to work.

When neighbors have to act as watchdogs, whistleblowers, and de facto investigators just to prevent a backroom surrender of public power, something is fundamentally broken. That reality says far more about Mount Vernon’s governance than any dollar figure ever could.

This Is What Civic Power Looks Like

We often end our communications with the phrase: Power to the People. This out outcome is what we mean by that, and it deserves to be named plainly.

A proposed settlement backed by money, lawyers, and institutional inertia did not collapse on its own. You stopped it.

Residents who paid attention, shared information, asked hard questions, and refused to accept a deal negotiated without them and against their interests. That is what civic power looks like – practiced in real life, in real time, forcing decisions that affect the public to be justified in public.

The settlement was pulled because people showed up. That’s worth remembering the next time someone says residents don’t have a voice in Mount Vernon.

We do, when we use it.

But what happens when those assumptions fail—when the officials responsible for zoning and planning do not do their jobs, and the “official” records instead appear sloppy, incomplete, or altered after the fact?

214 Gramatan happens.

The 214 Gramatan project is a large apartment building constructed practically on top of the private residence owned by Dina Periello. What was reviewed and approved on paper bears little resemblance to what was ultimately built. And when the project was later scrutinized through FOIL requests, the City’s zoning file revealed discrepancies that raise serious questions about whether the record was retrofitted to justify an unlawful structure rather than to reflect what was actually approved.

When 214 Gramatan happens, the problem is no longer confined to one property or one neighbor. The integrity of not just a single project, but the planning framework the City now claims to follow, is called into question.

The Records Appear Altered

Please review the attached documents, particularly the “214 Gramatan ZBA Application,” signed by Sal Saleh as owner and Tom Abillama as architect. This document was produced in response to FOIL requests and appears to be the only zoning application on file for this project.

Several key fields in this application show clear signs of alteration. On page 1, the entry for “Existing Site Area,” and on page 4, the entries for “Size of principal building,” “Number of dwelling units on site,” and the number of parking spaces before and after approval are all missing the standard printed line beneath the entry. In each instance, the figures are handwritten in a style that is arguably different from surrounding entries. One parking entry also appears to show that a prior figure was removed and replaced, with remnants of the original number still visible beneath the handwritten “26” and above the printed line. These anomalies do not appear elsewhere in the application.

These are not minor details. Site area, building size, and number of dwelling units are core facts the Zoning Board relies on to evaluate density, scale, and the extent of zoning relief being requested. They are foundational to the Board’s authority and decision-making.

The importance of these altered figures is underscored by the Zoning Board’s September 19, 2017, Findings of Fact. Those Findings repeatedly describe and analyze a project consisting of 36 dwelling units. They do not mention a 53-unit building, nor do they discuss the site-area figures that now appear on the application.

The first time the record reflects consideration of a substantially larger project is in the March 2019 Amended Findings of Fact. Yet the City’s files contain no amended zoning application, no dated revision, and no explanation of when the application data was changed or how those changes were presented to the Board. The file contains only the seemingly altered application, with signatures dated nearly three years earlier.

In other words, the only zoning application currently on file does not correspond to the project the Zoning Board actually reviewed and approved in 2017.

The presence of handwritten changes to the most consequential parts of the application—combined with the absence of any contemporaneous findings addressing those figures—raises serious questions about the integrity of the administrative record. At a minimum, the application and the Board’s findings do not match.

Residents are entitled to know when these changes were made, who made them, and why the official application now reflects numbers that were never the subject of the Board’s original review. Without that information, there is no basis to conclude that the zoning approvals were grounded in a complete, accurate, and transparent record—and no credible basis to offer assurances about the “integrity” of this project.

The Project Fundamentally Changed – But the Application and Review Process Did Not

The contrast between the September 2017 Findings of Fact and the March 2019 Amended Findings exposes a basic contradiction in the City’s own record. The project was treated as if it posed no environmental issues, even as City agencies were raising concerns about traffic, parking, sewer capacity, and shadow impacts—and, in some cases, calling for further investigation. Despite those unresolved issues, the Zoning Board closed out environmental review in 2017 by issuing what’s called a “Negative Declaration,” and never revisited it.

That decision is troubling on its own, but it becomes far more problematic in light of what followed. The Amended Findings were adopted after a substantial change in the project’s scale, intensity, and density. Even assuming—purely for argument’s sake—that the expanded project could be justified on zoning grounds, SEQRA does not permit environmental review to be frozen in time.

A Negative Declaration issued for an earlier version of a project cannot simply be carried forward after a material increase in size and density without revisiting environmental impacts. Yet there is no indication that the ZBA revisited SEQRA at all in connection with the amended approval. There is no supplemental environmental review, no discussion of whether the changes constituted a substantive change under SEQRA regulations, and no explanation for why the earlier Negative Declaration remained valid. The Amended Findings acknowledge a materially different project but are silent as to its environmental consequences.

You don’t need expert reports to see the problem.

The private home next door has been severely impacted—physically, functionally, and in terms of light, air, and livability. That reality makes the conclusion that this project posed “no significant adverse environmental impacts” ring hollow. If a neighboring home can be so profoundly affected, the claim that no deeper review was required was not just wrong—it was reckless.

At best, this reflects a City that failed to take a hard look. At worst, it suggests a willingness to preserve a paper finding long after reality made it indefensible.

Taken together:

• Altered application entries
• Escalating project scope
• No amended application matching the final build
• No additional substantive review
• No change to the SEQRA determination

…the question is unavoidable: how far did the City and/or the developers go to paper over zoning and environmental violations after the fact?

District Attorney Cacace should answer that question.

———————————————

Supporting Documents:

214 Gramatan ZBA Application

Findings of Fact – September 19, 2017 1

Amended Finding of Facts – March 28, 2019

Because if what Ms. Perriello lays out is even half true, then this isn’t merely a planning dispute or a neighbor complaint. It’s a case study in what happens when a city government treats residents like obstacles and public service like a branding exercise: gross negligence dressed up as procedure, and incompetence protected by titles.

“It never should have been approved” — and yet it kept going

Ms. Perriello’s story is not a single bad day. It’s a five-year slow-motion failure, with repeated claims that officials acknowledged something was wrong—yet the project advanced anyway.

According to her timeline and emails, demolition began in February 2019 with no permit, followed by a building permit in September 2020 for lot 3 only. Soon after, she says she learned the structure next door would have a zero setback and began sending urgent messages to city officials.

She describes being told variations of the same line Mount Vernon residents know too well: “Nothing can be done,” “Not my jurisdiction,” “It’s too late,” and finally, the coup d’grace, “Get a lawyer.”

In Mount Vernon, the highest taxed community in Westchester County, we don’t get governance—we get evasion.

And that’s how Ms. Perriello ends up with a building so close to her house that any old predator could step out of his window right onto her flat roof.

The core allegation: approvals missing for Lots 5 and 6

Here are the central claims Ms. Perriello repeats—and the ones to which the City has offered no response:

• The zoning application and approval was issued for Lot 3
• The building permit was issued for Lot 3
• The development was processed as if it involved multiple lots (Lots 3, 5, and 6)
• No further applications or approvals were issued for Lots 5 and 6
• After reviewing the property file in City Hall on May 14, 2024, Ms. Perriello discovered there was no zoning application or approval on file for Lots 5 and 6

FOIL responses later confirmed the same.

If that’s accurate, this isn’t a “whoops.” If we’re being generous, it’s a systemic breakdown of basic controls—exactly the kind of breakdown that ordinary residents pay for in property damage, legal fees, and sleepless nights while officials keep collecting paychecks.

But if we’re being real—and this is Mount Vernon—it is the clearest, most visible example of public corruption that we’ve seen in a long time.

The alleged damage: vibration, water, structural harm—and the shrug heard round City Hall

Ms. Perriello says that during months of excavation—bedrock work that she describes as extreme—she experienced severe vibrations, sought monitoring reports, and received little to nothing back. She claims the consequences now include:

• Structural concerns (including bedrock shifting into her basement floor)
• Asbestosis exposure from frayed insulated pipes
• Water drainage problems created by the new adjacent retaining wall
• An inability to ever repair a portion of her home where there is a zero setback
• Serious safety and quality-of-life impacts (privacy, trespass risk, and more)

Equally alarming is her claim that she repeatedly requested records (including vibration monitor reports) and that the response pattern was delay, deflection, and silence.

Mount Vernon residents should ask: If a city can’t produce basic monitoring and compliance records for a project of this scale, what exactly are “inspections” doing besides existing on paper?

Moreover, given the City’s recent crowing over the adoption of a sloppy, thoughtless comprehensive plan without benefit of an environmental review or fiscal study, residents should also ask themselves whether the people responsible for what happened to Ms. Perriello should be entrusted with a plan of that magnitude.

The cast of “not my job”

In a July 2025 email exchange, Ms. Perriello directly challenges Comptroller Darren Morton, who responded by emphasizing he was not Commissioner of Buildings and did not have jurisdiction over the Zoning Board.

And this is where Mount Vernon’s culture shows itself in full: the reflex to treat government like a circle of job descriptions instead of a responsibility to protect residents.

Ms. Perriello’s reply cuts to the heart of the problem: she alleges officials acted outside their roles when it suited them, failed to act inside their roles when residents needed them, and now want their titles to operate like immunity shields.

The City will say: that’s not fair. Residents will say: show us the record—and the record speaks for itself.

At the end of the day, two questions rise to the top: (1) if the approvals were proper, where are they? And (2) if they weren’t, who let this proceed—and why?

Because “I wasn’t the right person” isn’t an acceptable answer when a resident is warning you for years, producing documentation, requesting records, and describing harm.

Residents must also ask: who gained from this debacle?

A LoHud article published in August 2025 revealed that the architect behind this project was a longtime tenant of councilperson Caitlin Gleason, who was on the planning board when this was approved—and cast her vote of approval.

This is what public corruption looks like in real life—in real time—in technicolor.

What corruption actually looks like in Mount Vernon

People hear “corruption” and imagine a movie: envelopes, back rooms, dramatic arrests. And some of that probably happened here.

But more generally, in Mount Vernon, corruption often looks far more ordinary—and that’s why it survives. It looks like:

• Records that don’t exist when they should
• Enforcement that doesn’t happen when it must
• A permanent class of officials who know how to say “not my department” while the public eats the consequences

Ms. Perriello’s timeline lays out something far worse than bureaucratic delay. It documents alleged admissions like “it never should have been approved,” followed by years of deliberate inaction.

If those admissions are accurate, this isn’t mere failure. It’s cover-your-own-ass—and residents should be furious.

Senior officials did not fix the problem. They avoided it. They ghosted Ms. Perriello while the damage to her home compounded. That is unacceptable.

A taxpaying resident should not be forced into financial ruin hiring lawyers to correct the City’s own error—whether that error arose from negligence, incompetence, greed, or corruption.

Here, Ms. Perriello was victimized twice: first by Mount Vernon’s outrageous tax burden, and then by the refusal (or inability) of its “leaders” to do their jobs.

City officials must stop hiding behind titles and start taking responsibility. The City caused this harm. The City must make her whole.

What the City must release—now

Or, if the City disputes Ms. Perriello’s claims, it should provide the public immediately:

1. The full approval chain, site plan resolutions, and zoning determinations for Lots 3, 5, and 6
2. Proof of required notices, hearings, and filings (if any)
3. All inspection history, enforcement actions, and compliance records
4. Any vibration monitoring reports and related submissions required or received
5. A clear explanation of how an allegedly unapproved scope could proceed for years without decisive intervention
6. A pre- and post-survey proving the building is not encroaching
7. Fire and safety approvals

And to be clear: “we’re looking into it” is not an answer. Not after five years.

A note to officials tempted to dismiss this as “drama”

This is not drama. This is what happens when residents discover that the rules only apply to them.

Mount Vernon can keep pretending it’s “revitalizing,” but if residents can’t get straightforward answers about approvals next door to their homes—then what is being revitalized, exactly?

Not trust. Not accountability. Not the rule of law.

Just the same old Mount Vernon machine, grinding forward—until the next resident’s life becomes the next headline, and the next resident’s dream is destroyed.

Click here for more photos.