Welcome to the work session for the Pleasantville Board of Trustees.

Today is Monday, August 10.

And our primary work session discussion is a follow-up about the results of the Pleasantville Music Festival.

And its potential implications for what might happen in the future.

So also here among us in addition to the five board members is Bruce Figler, who was the executive director this year and uh many years in the past.

So welcome executive director or retired, then unretired, and then now retiring again.

Bruce Figner.

Greetings.

Salutations.

So here's what we

know.

The last final trips and drags are not in, but it would appear pretty solid that we have lost about 150,000.

Which is half a game more than we lost last year.

And that arises from a whole bunch

of

uh sources probably is the best to report on expenses mostly.

Right?

We've getting hit in every possible direction.

Yeah, yeah,

it was in a lot of ways it was death by paper cuts, but there were some some big hits in there.

Um, first of all, I mean, I

will

take blame for where blame is due.

At the end of the day, the lineup didn't have the horsepower it needed.

Um,

you

know, as the person who makes the decisions, uh ultimately it falls on my lap.

Uh, there were some things we couldn't do anything about.

We got a late start booking bands, bands we wanted were now either already booked or just ridiculously priced, and uh we just couldn't afford the bands to really move the the needle.

I had thought we did a good job cobbling together uh bands that would collectively put together uh a nice audience.

They were great, uh the performances were wonderful, but at the end of the day, it didn't draw the people we needed to draw.

Right,

so there was that aspect of it.

Then of course, we uh we lost

uh our funding from uh Northwell by

about 40 percent.

Right.

Uh and that we never really recovered from.

We also lost the previous years.

The previous director had brought in a number of uh sponsors, people he knew his connections, they did not come back.

So we uh we went from uh

I

think 90 something thousand dollars to

not

quite 70,000.

So that was uh that was a blow.

Um we never have been able to get the sponsorship dollars that uh we really could use to sustain

us.

Um we have tried any number of people who uh were going to be sponsored directors, sponsor you know, rainmakers.

Um and none of them really were able to produce anything, and I'm not sure how to go about doing that without hiring someone as a rainmaker, but that ends up costing us a lot of money.

Did run across this one woman several years ago who was interested in the job, and she said, Yeah, you're gonna put me on a retainer, and I'll get 50% of everything I bring in.

I said, Yeah, that's not gonna

work.

But who knows?

You know, it may have been worthwhile,

but it

just didn't seem like a good deal for the village.

So anyway, uh, we hope to get uh more support locally from the businesses here.

We got a small amount of that,

but