Erin council has voted in favour of including recording/publishing videos of meetings in its 2017 budget process.
Town clerk Dina Lundy presented a report of the different options to councillors during a May 17 meeting.
Lundy explained she looked into multiple options, including using YouTube.
“There are some issues in my mind with YouTube being that it’s not really easy for people out in the public to watch a five-hour video on YouTube; downloading problems, trying to find the item that you’re looking for in five hours of video is sometimes difficult,” she said.
In her report, Lundy also mentioned significant staff time would be required to manually upload, edit and manage each of the videos.
The other option Lundy presented was a video manager system from eSCRIBE, a document management system that Erin already uses for its agendas.
“I will be moving toward publishing our agendas and the reason for that is that more of an HTML format where people can go and click on the individual items that they are looking for,” she said.
“Each agenda would be listed like this, or past agendas, you would be able to view it in PDF, HTML, our minutes as well, and video if we do go that way.”
Lundy demonstrated how the system works using Strathcona County as an example.
The agenda would be presented in an HTML format, where each agenda item would be click-able.
The video would forward to where that item was discussed and associated documents associated would be listed underneath.
While Strathcona uses multiple cameras for its council sessions, Lundy recommends using only one camera in Erin.
“The Strathcona website has multiple cameras; we can’t do that here, it will be too [expensive]. We would have one camera that would be pointed toward all of council and the podium,” she said.
In her report, Lundy lists the potential cost for one camera at $1,500 to $2,500. The annual cost for the video manager is $10,300 in addition to the town’s existing support contract. Initial setup is listed as $7,400.
Lundy also recommended the video should be retained for 90 days.
Councillor Matt Sammut offered solutions he found in his research.
“There’s a lot of technology that’s so good today that utilizing them effectively actually eliminated the barriers instead of adds to them,” he said.
Councillor Jeff Duncan raised concerns about videotaping meetings.
“I’ll be up front with everyone, I was leery about going down this road just maybe more from the perspective, this is something new to municipal government,” he said.
Duncan added he has concerns with using YouTube.
“The main problem I had before, if we were to do the YouTube shotgun type of thing, it doesn’t really reflect that well on the municipality. As well, this eSCRIBE idea, or if there’s similar methods, is fantastic,” he said .
“To be frank, being on YouTube, or this kind of thing wasn’t something that we all signed up for.”
Council voted in favour of receiving the report and directed staff to include the video-related costs in the 2017 budget process.
