Yonkers Cheers on Patterson-Howard
By Dan Murphy
As the chaos in the City of Mt. Vernon continues, a disturbing fact was recently revealed about Acting Mayor Andre Wallace – the City Council president who was named acting mayor by the council after Mayor Richard Thomas pled guilty to campaign finance crimes and agreed to step down from office by Sept. 30.
The City Council didn’t want to wait until Sept. 30, and voted to remove Thomas last month, based on the City Charter. The courts agreed, and Thomas has departed City Hall, with Wallace becoming acting mayor.
Last week, former Mayor Thomas released a disturbing piece of information, that Wallace mortgaged one of his Mt. Vernon properties to post a $1 million bond for Jose Luperon, described by law enforcement as leader of a drug operation in north Manhattan.
Luperon was arrested by the New York Police Department in 2017 and charged with controlling the sale of crack cocaine in upper Manhattan. He remained jailed until Wallace posted bail, and was sentenced in March 2018 to 20 years in prison. Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance identified Luperon as the ringleader for a drug-dealing gang operation.
Wallace admitted mortgaging the properties and posting the bond for Luperon, claiming that his fiancée was a close friend for years and asked him to help. The fact that the City Council president and acting mayor in Mt. Vernon posted a $1 million bond for a drug kingpin in New York City should be shocking to everyone in Mt. Vernon, Yonkers and Westchester.
Wallace wants to serve as acting mayor until Patterson-Howard takes office, but how can he preside over the Mt. Vernon Police Department based on his actions and possible interactions with a gang lord drug dealer? We now wonder if the Federal Bureau of Investigations, or another law enforcement agency will be taking a look at Wallace’s other dealings.
Last week, the Mt. Vernon City Council named Councilwoman Lisa Copeland as council president and deemed Copeland now the acting mayor. Copeland, the former Mt. Vernon city clerk, has been involved in Mt. Vernon politics for decades and is respected by most factions within the Mt. Vernon Democratic Party.
But the council’s elevation of Copeland confuses the matter of who is mayor of Mt. Vernon to the point of insanity, and makes it even more difficult for the next mayor of Mt. Vernon, Shawyn Patterson-Howard, to govern and take control of the city for the good of the people.
Wallace, who is on the ballot for mayor running on the republican line, has invalidated himself to lead the city based on his decision to bail out a drug kingpin. Regardless of the reasons he did it, he should have realized that as council president and acting mayor, he should be held to a higher standard of ethics.
Patterson -Howard, winner of the democratic primary in June and the de facto next mayor of Mt. Vernon, is known by the people of Yonkers well. She has served as president and CEO of the YMCA of Yonkers on Warburton Avenue since 2008, when she became the first woman and person of color to lead the association.
For more than 10 years, Patterson-Howard has done a fantastic job leading the Y and using her experience in building coalitions, helping those who need assistance the most, and finding the untapped leadership potential of young people, women and persons of color. She is a role model for many and has shown how you can build a career through “servant leadership” and helping others.
“In 2008, I became CEO of the Yonkers YMCA in a neighborhood plagued by gun and gang violence,” she said. “I worked with State Sens. Andrea Stewart-Cousins and Ruth Hassell Thompson to bring the Chicago Ceasefire model of using specially trained ‘violence interrupters’ to Westchester in a Yonkers and Mount Vernon program called SNUG. By 2011, the Yonkers police credited SNUG with helping the city achieve a 38 percent reduction in violent crimes against persons citywide, and an 85 percent reduction in the neighborhoods monitored by SNUG.
“I have always been a community builder; a leader who brings people from diverse communities together to work for common goals,” continued Patterson-Howard. “While I was CEO of the Yonkers YMCA, our chapter won a national competition conducted by the national YMCA of the USA in partnership with the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to select 30 communities to test collaborative strategies to reduce health disparities.”
The Yonkers WMCA application included 85 partners, such as the county health department, City Hall, the Chamber of Commerce, public schools, mainstream and storefront faith communities, hospitals, major corporations, neighborhood bodegas, cultural groups, neighborhood centers and community leaders.
Patterson-Howard said one of her favorite African proverbs is, “When spiderwebs unite, we can tie up a lion.” Or, as they say in the Y, we are “Better Together.”
We also appreciate that Patterson-Howard draws enormous strength from her relationship with Christ, her expansive family, and the Greater Eternal Light Church where she serves as an Evangelist.
At the end of this year, Patterson-Howard will be moving on to become the next mayor of Mt. Vernon – the city where she grew up, went to high school and still lives today with her husband, Marvin, and daughter, Nia.
Why the City Council decided to remove Wallace as council president and acting mayor is unclear. Some council members have been quoted as saying that the decision was made because Wallace had “made decisions without consulting with the council.” One of those decisions may have been his efforts to uncover the truth about dumping at Memorial Field.
