Everett, Wash.
Published: Monday, June 1, 2009

Everett City Council meetings to go live online

The City Council plans to stream video in the fall, and other city departments and panels could follow.

By David Chircop
Herald Writer

 EVERETT -- Keeping tabs on Everett city government and seeing the voices and faces of elected officials is about to get a lot easier.

Come fall, the Everett City Council plans to stream live videos of its meetings online, with policy documents posted for people to download and read.

"It's a very important step for the city," City Councilman Mark Olson said. "It keeps us current with how local governments across the country are enabling people to access the record of their discussions and decisions ."

The city could eventually decide to broadcast meetings of the planning commission and other city panels on the Internet.

The videos will be archived and available on the city's Web site for a year.

The city is spending about $18,500 for hardware and training and a $1,060-a-month fee for computer server space.

An existing video feed of meetings used on Everett Channel 21 will be used for the broadcast. If someone misses a meeting, a video recording will available for replay on the city's Web site shortly after the meeting ends, said Joe Boland, Everett's information technology director.

Everett is by no means a pioneer in this field. A handful of cities, including Denver and Sacramento, Calif., began broadcasting videos on their Web sites nearly a decade ago.

The Snohomish County Council and the Mountlake Terrace City Council already broadcast live video of meetings on the Internet. Lynnwood, the Port of Everett and Monroe offer audio of their public meetings, although not in real time.

Toby Nixon, president of the Washington Coalition for Open Government, an independent organization that defends the public's right to know, said the move will make city government in Everett more accountable.

"Even if people never use it, just knowing that it's available goes a long way to increase trust in the government," he said.

Nixon pointed to TVW, an Olympia-based public affairs cable channel that's often called the Washington state version of C-SPAN, as an example of how technology can be used to make the workings of government more transparent.

In addition to its cable channel, TVW also webcasts gavel-to-gavel coverage of the state Legislature, the state Supreme Court, and other government institutions. Audio and video archives back to the mid-1990s are available on the Web site, tvw.org.

Once things are running, Everett will join more than 500 cities, counties, school boards and other public agencies that use an online system offered by San Francisco-based Granicus. Locally, others include Mountlake Terrace, Snohomish, Skagit and King counties, Woodinville, Kirkland, Bellevue and Olympia.

A searchable index is one of the features of the company's streaming media program. When reviewing old meetings, viewers can jump to video of the council deliberating on an individual agenda item or they can search for specific ordinances or broader topics.

"It's kind of becoming the cable cast of the Internet age," said Kelly Barlow, a regional director for Granicus.



David Chircop: 425-339-3429, dchircop@heraldnet.com.
© 2009The Daily Herald Co., Everett, WA