Speaker numbers apply only to this recording.
This work session of the Pleasantville Village Board of Trustees was held on October 16, 2025 (the agenda listed the date as Wednesday, October 15, 2025, but the instruction provided notes October 16, 2025; the meeting began at 7:00 PM and extended into the next day). The board discussed the 2025 Pleasantville Music Festival results, a flood mapping outreach proposal, and traffic calming studies.
Note: There is a date discrepancy: the agenda lists the meeting as Wednesday, October 15, 2025, but the instruction provides October 16, 2025. This summary uses the date provided in the instruction.
Good evening. Welcome to the work session for the Village of Pleasantville Board of Trustees. Today is Wednesday, October 15. Work session beginning at seven and regular meeting at eight. First item on our work session agenda is a visit with Doug Panero and continue discussion regarding the results of the July Pleasantville Music Festival. Director Doug Panero. Welcome, sir. Thank you. What are your thoughts? Tell me when you want me to share this screen. Why don't we do that first? Okay. But let me speak first and then we'll go through those slides. So for anyone who wasn't at the festival, you know, we had a vision for what it could be this year, and we in a in a way we thought was sustainable going forward. And it was very challenging, but I think it was a success. We'll talk about the numbers in a minute. And you know, the village, uh, the festival staff uh did an amazing job with a huge challenge. So we went to festival-wide beer this year, mixed results with revenue, albeit, but that was a big change. We had a friendlier, more attractive, accessible, accessible vendor village, which was a lot of fun. We had some music there as well. We partnered with Pace University, did a you know, a collaborative study of the festival with their marketing and advertising faculty and grad students based on data to come up with what we implemented, which was you know, a branding and realignment with along with the social media and marketing campaign to what we were hearing from them about you know what this festival uh could be in a way that the village could afford. Uh, we switched sound and stage contractors. That's no small task. We we had trouble in 23 and 24 as uh the former manager, uh former director, Bruce is sitting here, will tell you, uh, with very good results. It was more expensive, but I think the quality was definitely there. We uh I was sitting in this chair last year. We talked about reducing the artist budget, which we did by about 10,000 by eliminating one of the slots on each of the stages. Uh we did some, albeit expensive uh redesign of the stages to avoid sound uh bleeds so that people can enjoy music on the party stage and the chill stage uh simultaneously. Uh we heard people talking about cover and tribute bands, so we added uh an amazing tribute band on the main stage, uh cover band as well, more family programming. We had Westchester Soccer Club there doing all sorts of activities. We continued the tradition of having vans with local ties. We had a 10-year-old guitarist who made it to America's Got Talent as a semifinalist. Got a lot of press out of that. Um we overcame a lot as Eric and the mayor can attest. We had you know, our headliner on the main stage, Dawes survived the wildfires professionally and personally, and that wreaked havoc on our establishment of uh the main stage lineup. And our second on main stage was sort of a dysfunctional artist, Robert Randolph.