By Corey Fischer

Council Meetings Going Online

Feb 26, 2018 | 10:40 AM

Photo: View that will be used of Vernon council meetings using high quality video capture camera (City of Vernon)

Vernon council meetings will soon be available to watch online.

Council has agreed to install a high quality video capture camera in council chambers that will record the meetings, and a third party service (Sliq) will display them on the city’s website for public viewing.

Council and staff discussed several different viewing options, and moved the camera to a different site in the room to test it out, eventually going with one that caught most of the councillor’s area, a bit of the gallery, and the speaker’s podium.

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Councillor Scott Anderson raised the idea of providing the recordings last year.

“It makes it easier for people to see what’s going on. They don’t have to wait until Shaw broadcasts it — I’ve never a seen a Shaw broadcast myself — but now they can just go the website and watch it,” Anderson tells CJIB News

Mayor Akbal Mund says the online recordings will be kept for two meetings and then overwritten, partly due to Freedom Of Information requests.

“We’ll probably have somebody ask, ‘why isn’t it kept for an entire year?’ If somebody asks us a Freedom of Information question, then were gong to have to pan through every one of these, and that’s time and money. It’s unfortunate, but I think this allows people for at least a month and a half, they can back and view the last two meetings.”

It’s not believed the meetings will be streamed live, but recorded and posted on the city’s website.

Shaw TV also broadcasts council meetings, on a taped delayed basis.

Nick Nilsen, communications officer for the City of Vernon, says the the recording and online distribution of council meetings has a one-time startup cost of $7,000 to purchase the equipment (camera, encoder, cables, etc) and make some modifications to council chambers to mount the camera; plus an annual fee of $9,694 to store and stream the content from the service provider, and to upgrade the City’s current Internet capacity so that the Internet service levels to the public can be maintained during the uploading of content to the streaming site.

Nilson says the city expects to be ready to begin recording at the end of April.

by Corey Fischer