THE SUNDAY SERIES
By The Integrity Project
ARPA in Mount Vernon, Part 3: 2022 - Are Vehicles the Recovery Plan?
By the start of 2022, the City’s ARPA program still lacked the essential infrastructure required for responsible public spending. There were no internal controls, no eligibility standards, no real project tracking, and no defined recovery strategy. Without these safeguards, the City’s ARPA dollars followed the path of least resistance, and that path did not lead to residents. It led to more vehicles, which begged the question: were vehicles meant to be the recovery plan?
I. Another Year Without a Strategy
The City entered 2022 with millions in ARPA funds remaining and still none of the required systems in place to ensure accountability. There was no policy describing how projects would be selected, no guidance on what documentation departments needed to maintain, no structure for procurement, no oversight committee, and no public facing plan of any kind.Still, spending increased by roughly 28%, but not on residents, small businesses, public health, or pandemic recovery. Instead, the City doubled down on what had already dominated 2021: vehicles.
SUVs, sedans, garbage trucks, Explorers, Escapes, SuperDuty pickups, Interceptors, an emergency vehicle, three dozen vehicles poured into department inventories. The one-time federal relief meant to stabilize a struggling community instead became a once-in-a-generation opportunity to refresh City fleet, with no justification for why these capital purchases were necessary for recovery.
II. The Scale of 2022 Vehicle SpendingIn 2022, vehicles were the single largest category of ARPA spending, consuming 38.1% of all documented expenditures. When combined with sewer projects, vehicles + sewer infrastructure account for roughly two-thirds of all ARPA dollars spent that year.Vehicles had already overwhelmed the 2021 spending patterns, but by 2022 the trend had hardened into a governing philosophy: if ARPA was available, the answer was vehicles
Year Total Spending Vehicle Spending % Vehicle2021 $4,455,336 $3,097,388 69.5%2022 $5,702,661 $2,174,887 38.1%Combined $10,157,987 $5,272,275 59.9%
Even the non vehicle categories, GIS and OpenGov licensing, Microsoft Office, laptops, monitors, were almost entirely internal, administrative, and City Hall facing. Almost nothing aimed outward toward the residents who experienced the economic impacts ARPA was designed to address.
In other words, ARPA did not flow to the people of Mount Vernon. It flowed inward, into City Hall, its systems, and its fleet.Only two 2022 initiatives could reasonably be described as resident directed: The Financial Navigators program and the Guaranteed Income Pilot.
III. The Illusion of Resident Programs, Less Than 2% of ARPA Reached Mount Vernon Families
Despite public messaging that highlighted initiatives like Financial Navigators and the Mayor’s Guaranteed Income program, the numbers show the reality:Out of more than $5.7 million in 2022 ARPA spending, only $89,870, just 1.6%, supported anything resembling direct resident assistance.
Financial Navigators - $35,000 (0.6%)
This phone based financial counseling program, operated by the United Way, was meant to help residents navigate available aid programs. Yet the City’s records show no documentation of outcomes, reporting, call volume, or impact, all required under ARPA rules. Thus, whether the program meaningfully reached residents remains unknown.
Guaranteed Income Pilot - $54,870 (0.9%)
The Guaranteed Income Pilot is built on a simple premise: giving families direct, unconditional cash can reduce the chronic financial instability that keeps people in crisis. The program identifies eligible residents and provides them with a predictable monthly payment they can use for any purpose. Mount Vernon’s initiative was part of a national research effort examining how consistent cash support affects stress, opportunity, and long-term economic outcomes.
But in 2022, none of that support reached Mount Vernon families. Instead, the ARPA dollars associated with the program funded a research fellow who responsible for coordinating the City’s participation: managing outreach, conducting surveys and interviews, ensuring compliance, collecting data, and preparing materials for the evaluation team at the University of Pennsylvania. When the City Council approved Mount Vernon’s involvement, it also authorized the use of $1.6 million in ARPA funds to provide grants to either 200 low-income residents or 130 low-moderate income residents. No grants were issued in 2022.
In total, less than two cents of every ARPA dollar spent in 2022 went toward families, economic stabilization, or COVID related hardship.
IV. What 2022 Reveals
The story of ARPA in 2022 is not defined by any single failure, it is defined by the vacuum in which decisions were made. With millions in federal funds and no functioning internal system to direct them, spending drifted toward whatever was easiest, fastest, and least scrutinized. And in Mount Vernon, the path of least resistance was fleet.
This is why 2022 stands out. Not because spending dramatically spiked, but because the City’s ARPA program revealed itself to have no meaningful, resident-facing strategy. The only consistent, well-funded through-line was vehicles. For the first two years of ARPA spending, vehicles effectively became the recovery plan.And when a municipality spends more on SUVs than on its families, businesses, public health, housing, or long-term stability, that is not merely a budgeting quirk, it is a statement of priorities, written in line items, invoices, and fleet rolls.
By the end of 2022, the underlying problems remained unchanged: widening deficits, rising overtime, deteriorating services, and a total absence of fiscal structure or control.
And so, Mount Vernon entered 2023 with new vehicles in every department, and the same old crisis everywhere else. ARPA bought Mount Vernon a fleet, not a future.
IV. STILL NO SIGN OF OUR $10 MILLION…* * *Part 4: 2023 preview – Another sixteen vehicles. An $82,000 demolition tied to the father of a Comptroller employee who has over $200,000 in tax arrears. A series of questionable emergency declarations enabling ARPA spending. Nearly $1 million budgeted for gift cards with no public record of how, or whether, they were distributed. And still no trace of the missing $10 million Revenue Replacement allowance. |
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