The Mayor and City Council of Midland, TX, conducted a public hearing on October 13 in which the citizens had a few minutes each to be heard on the subject of a proposed drilling ordinance. The hearing was recorded, and the hour and 45 minute video is available for viewing at this Youtube site. And it's being shown on Tall City TV, Suddenlink's government access channel.
Bravo! It's great to see the City Council utilizing the government access channel. It looks like they used two cameras, and the final product was edited for views from different angles. Hopefully they didn't spend a whole lot of money on this. There are cameras in the city inventory, and surely there are employees who can operate them.
We've talked about the government channel before. See Tall City TV should broadcast the City Council meetings from last August in which I suggested they use volunteers to operate cameras for broadcast on the TV channel if city employees aren't available.
It would be a waste of resources if they can't use it to let citizens sit in on important city meetings.
AS a former employee of the city I can tell you that yes skilled camra people work for the city.
Many of them work with information systems which also has a very high quality web programming and design team.
So using TCTV for city council meetings would be easy and relatively problem free.
Not to mention the council could draw from among their own districts to find folks.
Just think of a retired video camra buff...that person would probably enjoy such a task.
Alas though this city is to closed minded on the council side of things to consider such a thing.
Posted by: Advocatus | October 29, 2009 at 06:18 PM
Advocatus, it's great to hear from an insider about this. Thanks for sharing the information with us.
The council meetings typically get a tiny amount of news coverage so it seems like such a waste not to utilize Tall City TV to broadcast the whole thing. It's done in other cities, so they wouldn't be breaking new ground.
The council members and mayor are not camera shy, but maybe they just don't want people to see them in an unrehearsed situation
Posted by: Geo | October 30, 2009 at 06:40 AM