Linn supervisors look to the video era

CEDAR RAPIDS - Come 2016, the Linn County Board of Supervisors is apt to record its meetings for viewing over the Internet.

The move would bring the supervisors into the world of other local elected officials, as both the Cedar Rapids City Council and Cedar Rapids school board have been providing videos of their meetings for years.

The supervisors' support for recording their meetings and providing video for webcasting would end one dispute with Linn County Auditor Joel Miller.

Miller has called on the supervisors to turn on video equipment they had installed in the both the board's formal and informal meeting rooms after the county's Public Service Center was remodeled and enlarged after taking on water in the 2008 flood. Up to now, though, the supervisors have kept the cameras off, saying the additional cost to activate them and webcast was too large.

This prompted Miller earlier this year to set up his own one-camera, low-budget operation to record the meetings himself, videos he posts on the county's website.

At the same time, the supervisors and Phil Lowder, the county's information technology director, have been researching webcasting vendors and equipment to see how costly it would be to make the county's video equipment operational.

On Monday, the supervisors heard a presentation from Granicus Inc. of Denver, after which supervisors said they liked what they heard.

Supervisor Ben Rogers said he recalled working with vendors included Granicus more than five years ago when the price to provide additional technology to operate the camera system was about $50,000 a year. Supervisor Linda Langston said the cost was a 'barrier” to a purchase at the time.

However, the proposed cost now includes a one-time cost of about $9,000 for computer hardware, which would connect to the video equipment to enable webcasting of county meetings. The cost would pay for two 'encoders,” one for the supervisors' formal boardroom and one for its informal boardroom.

In addition to the upfront cost, the county would pay Granicus $850 a month to provide the service.

'This is obviously a lot more manageable,” Rogers said of the proposal.

Langston, Rogers and Supervisor Brent Oleson said they anticipated the supervisors purchasing the equipment as it approves its next budget early in 2016.

Langston and Oleson said they would like to see the county cover the cost of the webcasting system by reducing the size and cost of the published minutes of supervisor meetings.

The meeting minutes, which Auditor Miller's office creates, has been another sticking point between him and the supervisors. Miller has favored extensive minutes, in part, because the supervisors don't videotape their meetings. For their part, the supervisors have said they favor more succinct minutes, which they have said would be more in line with what other governmental bodies publish and which would cost less to print.

Langston said the county spends more than $100,000 a year to publish meeting minutes in four different newspapers. That amount is some $30,000 more than the county spent in recent years, Darrin Gage, the county's director of policy and administration, said.

Initially, any webcasting would not be pushed live to the Internet because of limitations to the hardware and the extra cost required, the county's Lowder said.

Monday afternoon, Miller said the supervisors' move was 'a victory.”

'I'll take it,” he said. 'It's great for the taxpayer and it's another step for transparency.”

Miller said the supervisors' camera system is sophisticated and can capture those who speak to the supervisors as well as what the supervisors say at a meeting. His one-camera setup can't capture what speakers say to the supervisors, he said.

But expect continued debate about reducing the size of published meeting minutes, Miller said. He said a lot of people depend on them.