Mount Vernon Mayor Shawyn Patterson-Howard is taking legal action against city Comptroller Deborah Reynolds.

City officials say the comptroller's refusal to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars in outstanding unpaid bills is crippling city services.

"We just served her with papers that she refused to accept for a 330 appointment in Westchester County Court to get a temporary restraining order to force her to pay the fuel bills," says Patterson-Howard.

The mayor says the unpaid fuel bills are putting public safety at risk.

"We want to make sure that our police cars, we want to make sure that our fire engines and our DPW fleet are able to do thier job," she says.

Reynolds says the crisis is the mayor's fault.

"All she has to do submit them to us, make an appointment, submit the vouchers so that we can process them," she says.

Patterson-Howard says her office has tried to do that repeatedly for months and Reynolds refused. She says she has emails to back it up.

In a last-ditch effort a get Reynolds to accept the vouchers, a mayoral staffer went to Reynolds' office in person.

Reynolds says they had no right to be there and called the police.

As things come to a head and city services continue to suffer, both sides are saying that they'd welcome the state to step in.