Shawyn Patterson-Howard, first woman elected mayor of Mount Vernon, sworn in to office

Shawyn Patterson-Howard officially took office today as mayor of Mount Vernon after a private swearing-in ceremony Tuesday afternoon.

She took the oath of office, administered by City Judge Nichelle Johnson, at the historic St. Paul’s Church. In a Facebook post just after midnight, she wrote she was "excited and prepared to embark on this journey" with the people of Mount Vernon.

"The days ahead will be challenging," she wrote. "We have wounds to heal and bridges to repair, but I am confident that we will come together to restore and revive our city. Mount Vernon, let us work to make our community as strong as we all know it can be."

A public inauguration is scheduled for 1 p.m. Saturday at Nellie Thornton High School. Tickets have already been distributed but the event will be streamed live on Facebook.

In November, Patterson-Howard became the first woman elected Mount Vernon mayor — and the first black woman elected mayor in Westchester County — in a landslide victory over the sitting mayor Andre Wallace and Rosemarie Jarosz.

Her win was all but assured in late June when Patterson-Howard beat then-Mayor Richard Thomas, Clyde Isley and Wallace, who was then the city council president, in the Democratic primary.

Wallace became mayor after Thomas was deemed to have vacated the office by pleading guilty in July to misdemeanors for stealing money from his campaign.

Thomas though refused to leave and the city was embroiled in a weeks-long drama over who was the mayor, including after Thomas finally left and the council tried to replace Wallace with Councilwoman Lisa Copeland. 

The saga highlighted the dysfunction of City Hall that Patterson-Howard said she intends to reverse.

So far, she has made no announcements regarding staff. One of her first orders of business is to work with the council on a city budget for 2020. Wallace's proposed budget in November was not accepted by the Board of Estimate, stalling the budget process.

But before immersing herself in the day-to-day of leading the city, she spent New Year's traversing the county to attend to swearing-in ceremonies of other mayors, Andre Rainey in Peekskill, Michael Spano in in Yonkers and Noam Bramson in New Rochelle.

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Patterson-Howard was the president of the Yonkers YMCA when Thomas in 2016 made her his planning commissioner and director of the Mount Vernon Urban Renewal Agency. She was suspended less than a year later and eventually replaced and returned to the YMCA. She launched her bid for mayor early this year.

Copeland will be sworn into her second four-year term on the City Council and Derrick Thompson to his first on Thursday night. The council is also expected to vote on its president for the year. The position is key as whoever is chosen sits with the mayor and the comptroller on the Board of Estimate & Contract, which approves most city salaries and contracts.

Traditionally, the position is rotated among the council members for one-year terms. But the current president, Janice Duarte, held the position for less than half a year after she succeeded Wallace when he became mayor.

Twitter: @jonbandler