A New Castle festival wants to give you the business. The committee overseeing the city’s annual Italian Festival at Cascade Park decided two weeks ago to forego this year’s event. The goal for next year is to trim the festival from three days to one. The reason? “It becomes hard to have an Italian festival if you don’t have a lot of food vendors,” explained Brian Heichel, assistant city public works director and a member of the Italian Day committee.

He said the issue had nothing to do with money, donations or entertainment. “It was honestly the food vendors,” he said. “We couldn’t get enough to pull it off. We decided to put it off this year and rework it for next year.” Board member Alyson Joseph said vendor letters were sent out to Pittsburgh, Sharon and Youngstown.