Town council discusses recording of resolutions in closed session

By Kenyon Stronski
Local Journalism Initiative Reporter
reporter@tabertimes.com

The recording of resolutions in closed session was discussed by council during the closed session of the Feb. 14 council meeting. It was moved by Coun. Alf Rudd that council direct administration to prepare a statement to appear on the broadcast describing the process of being in closed session and that they have a proper statement read in that transition from closed session to open for community clarification, and the council livestream broadcast continues when council moves into open session following closed session.

Town IT Manager Alaa Khaliq presented administration’s research and recommendations at the Feb. 28 regular meeting of council.

“Let’s explain how the system works in the chamber first. When we start the livestreaming, the audio and video moves from here to YouTube and there’s around a 10 to 15 second lag, so we catch up on that and once we put the system on mute, no conversation is heard to guarantee the council privacy during closed session. When we go on break or closed session, we put the system in mute so the public can’t hear what’s happening. When we are muted on YouTube, there is no audio and we have the option for a background image, so we display to the public what’s happening in the state of our black screen. It’s just the one picture, and when we go to mute, it displays that on YouTube. Administration drafted a new graphic — if we continue the live-streaming during closed session, we lose the capability of conference calls because again we will have to mute the system so no feed will go through to YouTube, Zoom, or any platform, so we want that to be known to council that we will lose that capability if we continue the livestream. The only option would be to go back to the old days where we had a cellphone and we just talked and hoped for the best that they could hear. The only problem with that is we can’t have a feed from a cellphone when we are in public session. And we wanted to bring that to attention.”

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