Hochul announces start of Mount Vernon infrastructure construction

Gov. Kathy Hochul was at the Doles Community Center in Mount Vernon on May 11 to announce the start of major piece of construction the $150 million project to upgrade the city’s sewer and water systems.

“I’m really proud to announce, I wanted to be here at the start of this, we are starting construction on the critically important Third Street sewer project, which will ensure wastewater service and an enhanced quality of life for 5,000 residents who have been waiting forever,” Hochul said. “Last year I said, ‘Third Street, help is on the way’ and here that help is. Help has arrived.”

Hochul said the planning and design process of the project was accelerated so that ground can be broken on a major part of the $150 million program a year after it was first announced. She also explained that some work had previously been started in Mount Vernon. For more than two decades residents in sections of Mount Vernon have been dealing with increasingly serious sewer backups and other wastewater and stormwater issues.

“We worked on 33 emergency repair projects because there were a lot of things that had to happen before we could do the major work,” Hochul said. “We kicked off a program to help the infrastructure system start working now. We worked with the Board of Water Supply helping replace lines that were filled with lead and bring relief directly to our residents. Also we started working on our $3 million Mount Vernon Healthy Homes Initiative because we had to install equipment (backflow valves). We had to prevent the backflow right now in the water infiltration systems that needed to be in there so that’s why we said this project’s going to take a long time overall but what could we do in the short-term to give people some relief.”

Mount Vernon Mayor Shawyn Patterson-Howard provided additional details of what has been accomplished so far.

“This is record-setting. Less than one year later the money is starting to take impact,” Patterson-Howard said. “In 2020 we talked about our sewer system that’s over 100 years old and decayed. In 2020, we fixed about 3,000 linear feet of sewer line. In 2021, we were able to fix 5,000 linear feet of sewer line. But in 2022, once we had partnerships and money, we’re up to 20,000 linear feet of sewer line. Ninety percent of our sewer system and our stormwater system have been digitally mapped and that’s incredible because without the digital mapping we would not be able to do the work.”

Patterson-Howard said that the Mount Vernon sewer system has 1.8 million linear feet of pipes. She said $3 million in federal funding was used to pay for mapping the sewer system. She credited Sen. Chuck Schumer, Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand and Rep. Jamaal Bowman with having obtained the funding for Mount Vernon.

“We have 12,000 water customers,” Patterson-Howard said. “We have been able to test over 9,000 of those water customers and what we found out is that 64% so far of all of our water service lines from the street to the house are lead. It’s important for us to know this so that we can now work with the state and federal governments and foundations to secure money to replace these. But the first thing we had to do was map it. Once you’re able to diagnose the problem you’re able to make the case to solve the problem.”

Patterson-Howard, Hochul, Westchester County Executive George Latimer and other speakers at the Doles Center event all had praise for the state, county and local public works staff members who have been working to upgrade the infrastructure in Mount Vernon. Patterson-Howard presented Hochul with a public works uniform that had her name embroidered on it.