(Photo by Tomas Sobek)
A month after green-lighting the larger Hudson Project Music and Arts Festival, the Planning Board signed off on the One Love Fest, a yoga festival planned for Aug. 15-17.
The Town Board will need to approve mass gathering permits for both, and the larger festival will require additional county approval.
Promoter Kenneth Schwenker said he has produced three festivals over the past three years. The festivals include yoga, music, ecology and local vendors. “It’s actually quite a community gathering event, and we’re now bringing it to the Winston Farm.”
The group is preparing a site plan, which will be presented to the Town Board in the near future, Stock said. This will be more detailed than the presentation to the Planning Board, and will show the location of water, garbage disposal plans, porta-Johns, waste water and camping areas. The event will be held on a portion of the property north of Augusta Savage Rd., while the camping, sanitary, parking and similar amenities would be to the south of the road. Should it be necessary, the organizers have also arranged for parking with the Sullivan Farm on Lauren Tice Rd.; shuttle buses would bring the concert patrons to the Winston Farm site.
Robert Pullman, a production manager and event producer, said the plan is to use as much local resources and talent as possible. “A lot of what I do is low-voltage LED lighting, and our goal is to bring as much bio diesel and alternative fuels as possible. There’s a very strong eco-education element to this event. We will have programs and workshops going on about composting and sustainable energy. Zero waste is our goal for this one, although we’ll be working with local sanitation to manage this event. We have a very strong goal, a very high standard, and we’ll aim for that. Our goal is to leave no trace and hopefully make an improvement.”
The organizers have plans for water, waste management, parking, crowd control and security, “and we’re putting all those together using local departments and resources,” he said.
“Because this is the first year we’re bringing this to this area, we thought about the numbers that would be involved,” Stock said. “We’re going to keep this under 5,000 people, including staff camping, because this is the number that would trigger mass gathering on a county level.”
The aim would be to have people stay for the three-day event and camp on the site, Stock said. “If there are any day-trippers that may come, they would go to the box office and park at the offsite facility and be bused down to the event. This is a very low-key event, as you can imagine, being yoga and the other elements they bring with it; the impact to the town is far less than any event we have had in the past.”
While the organizers would hope to have larger events in the future, “this is going to be a small number of people the first year. As it grows, and as the permits require us to accommodate growth, that’s what we will do,” Stock said.
