It is November 18th, and the City of Mount Vernon still does not have a budget.Not a draft. Not a proposal. Nothing.
This is a violation of the Mount Vernon Charter, and breaking the Charter is breaking the law.
The Charter is not advisory. It is binding law. It spells out the calendar for fiscal governance with precision:
- Department heads submit their estimates by August 31.
- The Board of Estimate and Contract (here, the mayor, the comptroller, and the city council president) publishes notice of a public hearing by October 25.
- That hearing must occur by November 19.
- The Board must adopt the budget by November 23 and send it to the City Council, which must adopt it by December 5.
Those dates aren’t guidelines. They’re mandates. And they exist to prevent exactly what is happening now, the city being “run” on borrowed money while taxpayers are left in the dark, without even so much as a spreadsheet.
Officials who willfully disregard those duties are in breach of the Charter and their oaths of office. Under the Charter, that’s grounds for removal.
The remedy isn’t another Town Hall. It’s accountability.But instead of accountability, on November 20, three days before we were supposed to get an adopted budget, we get Darren Morton theater: a “Town Hall” where, if history serves, the Comptroller will wax poetic about always trying to do the right thing, blame everyone else for his being unable to do his job, tell us all what he “will not do,” which usually means that he will not directly address valid criticism, and wherein he will say absolutely nothing else that is actually useful.
According to the Town Hall notice, it is being held to “update residents” on the city’s finances and multi-year planning initiative. But how can residents take seriously a “multiyear plan” from someone still fighting for his life to make it out of this year? And where was this “multi-year plan” four years ago? And why is it that Morton’s road shows and town halls only spring up before elections or when disaster strikes, like when $400,000 of taxpayer money mysteriously disappears?
Bottom line, the Charter isn’t optional. It’s the law. And every day the City fails to comply, it’s not just bad management, it’s an illegal dereliction of duty. A town hall won’t fix that.
The TAN Talk Nobody Asked ForAnother topic of conversation on November 20th will likely be last week’s community notice about a $7 million Tax Anticipation Note (TAN), a loan that literally borrows against next year’s property tax revenue to cover this year’s bills.
In his notice, Morton assures residents that a TAN “does not increase taxes or create new debt beyond this fiscal year.” That statement is as misleading as it is dangerous. A TAN is debt, temporary, high-interest, and a flashing red warning sign of a city running on fumes. Cities with healthy reserves don’t need to take out payday loans to make payroll. And make no mistake about it, this is the municipal equivalent of a payday loan. It is city officials taking our tax equity to the local pawn shop so they can keep the lights on until they can score another shift at the Dollar Tree.
Mount Vernon taxpayers are being asked to swallow this as “business as usual,” even as the City’s fund balance sits at zero and its bills pile up from years of fiscal negligence.In business-as-usual fashion, Morton’s TAN notice blames “obligations from prior years” and “cash flow challenges,” listing IRS penalties, unpaid health costs, and back taxes as if they justify the present dysfunction. These debts are not new. They are the direct result of years of mismanagement and inaction.
Worse and tellingly, all of these obligations existed when city officials gave themselves hefty salary increases; purchased luxury vehicles; authorized payment for a near constant parade of out-of-town junkets, “trainings,” and other unnecessary expenditures; and forced taxpayers to fund over $1 million annually for a so-called mayoral “security detail” that functions as a chauffeur service. Add to that a wave of indiscriminate hiring, complete with health and pension benefits that officials themselves do not pay into, and you have a government spending lavishly while the city falls apart.
No private company could operate this way and survive. And yet, in Mount Vernon, this level of incompetence is normalized.
Enough ExcusesCity officials swore an oath to uphold the Charter. They don’t get to pick which parts to follow. The failure to produce a budget by the statutory deadline isn’t just incompetence, it’s a legal dereliction of duty.If the Mayor, Comptroller, and members of the Board of Estimate and Contract (ridiculously here, the mayor, the controller, and city council president) cannot meet their most basic legal obligation, producing a budget, they should resign or be removed. The law allows for nothing less.
Moreover, until the City releases its budget, every speech, meeting, and press release is just political noise. And every day without one is another reminder that Mount Vernon’s greatest fiscal crisis isn’t just a shortage of funds, it’s a shortage of honesty, integrity, accountability, and leadership.
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