Video planned for council meetings

By Jeremy Twitchell

Thursday, Sept. 11, 2008 | midnight

While Henderson has no immediate plans to join its neighboring cities in broadcasting its public meetings, city officials are moving forward with a plan to do the next best thing — provide recordings of the proceedings online.

The City Council unanimously approved as much as $230,000 on Sept. 2 to purchase and install new cameras and equipment in the council chambers. City staff are working out a contract and hope to have it approved in October.

If all goes according to plan, City Clerk Monica Simmons said, the service could be available in January.

The city plans to purchase three new cameras. At present, there are only two cameras in the council chambers: one in the ceiling to zoom in on documents placed on the speaker's dais and project them on the chamber's screens, the other pointed at the speaker to do the same.

City spokeswoman Kathy Blaha said the new cameras will not be for broadcasting the meetings.

"It's more for record-keeping purposes so that people can go in and see what happened with an agenda item," she said.

Simmons said the city needed to upgrade the aging document camera and speaker camera, and in the process decided to purchase a third camera to point at the council, to begin providing a complete visual recording of the meetings.

Simmons said her office receives several requests for meeting recordings, but it doesn't produce them because of time and money constraints. The meeting minutes serve as the official record for the council, she said.

By recording the meetings and making them available online, possibly as early as the following day, Simmons said she hopes to provide a low-cost solution that will meet residents' needs.

"They would be able to go online the next day and see for themselves what happened," Simmons said. "We don't broadcast our meetings and I don't think there are any plans to do so, but this is a simple, cost-effective way to provide a video record."

The deal will also provide video conferencing capability for the chambers so traveling council members can better participate in meetings. Right now, the city uses teleconferencing, which Simmons said isn't as effective.

"It works, but it's difficult for (council members), because it's hard to follow what's going on when you're not there, watching what's happening," she said.

Simmons said the project will be relatively simple, because there won't be any major infrastructure changes to the room. Despite its relative ease, however, she said it is an important project and one the city is excited to complete.

"I just think it will be a great resource … for the media and for the public as well," she said.