Speaker numbers apply only to this recording.
The Pleasantville Village Board of Trustees held a work session on June 10, 2025, at Village Hall, chaired by a trustee filling in for Mayor Peter Scher who was on holiday. The meeting focused on two main topics: feedback from the New York Conference of Mayors (NYCOM) annual meeting and the selection process for a public art mural installation in Jackson Alley, funded by a grant from Arts Westchester.
All right, good evening. It is June 9th. Welcome to the work session of the Village of Pleasantville. We have two items on the agenda for this evening. I should begin by saying that Mayor Peter Scher is on holiday. And so I will be filling in for him tonight. So we're gonna I'm gonna talk a little bit about um the experience we had going to the NICOM conference last week, and then we're gonna talk about a public art mural installation. So the mayor uh and I went last week to an annual conference of the um uh the New York Conference of Mayors, um, which um is an organization that um sort of uh um gives recommendations and advice to um cities and villages specifically. Uh so we attended, we sort of split up and attended a number of different sessions, um, including the Albany Update, which is an update on obviously what's happening in government affairs. Um I attended a climate leadership opportunities for local government session, uh, one on social solar for local government leaders. Uh Peter attended a talk on cybersecurity with speakers from the division of homeland security, which is apparently terrifying but also interesting. Um and there was one panel in particular that I thought I would share with you guys um on leveraging social media for local impact. So they had somebody from NICOM was there, and um Stuart Rabbin from the village of Porchester, who I guess is very active on social media. Um so I thought I would sort of like summarize some of the points. I won't go into it, everything that was covered, um, but I had some takeaways from that um of things I thought that we could discuss. We're always kind of circling back around to the question of how we communicate, um, you know, how we best reach out to people to residents in the village, and it obviously it's a shifting landscape. So I feel like it's something that you know we're constantly trying to improve on and um tweak, you know, as we go along. So um, so one point that was made, oh, and also it was an interesting session in that it wasn't just the speakers, you know, it was a lecturing. It there were a lot of people in the audience who who gave interesting points as well. There was quite a showing from Westchester at the NICOM conference this year, so a lot of Westchester people chiming in. Um, so one point that was reiterated was that um social media is not the best way to engage in discussion with residents. Um so they kind of underline the fact that it circumvents government protocol and creates a record that is foilable, and so they really recommended against getting into a debate or a back and forth on social media. So um they recommended it using it really more as a way to communicate to get your message across, you know, to send updates and so on. So um that was kind of reassuring to me because it sort of confirmed my general impression. Um, and um, you know, I heard that from from people from lots of different municipalities as well. So and then they went through and talked about different um forms of social media. So one of the ones I wanted to talk about is Instagram. So I'm going to pull up. I'm going to share our Instagram accounts. Here we go. All right. Allow. Okay. It