Putting audio recordings of city council meetings online is on Langley’s list of things to do.
A citizen recently requested to have the recordings available online, prompting Councilman Thomas Gill to put the proposal on Monday’s agenda. The request came from former councilman Hal Seligson, who had forfeited a year of his council stipend in 2011 to purchase audio recording equipment for the council chambers. The equipment is used, but stops short of having the audio recordings posted online.
Currently, a public records request or coming in to City Hall are the only options for obtaining the digital audio. Providing audio of council meetings is not required by state law, but was of interest to the city council as a show of good faith for open government.
Mayor Fred McCarthy said he had initial reservations about agreeing to put them online. One of his worries was that uploading or offering audio recordings would necessitate a transcription of the meetings, a time-consuming and costly service, he said.
“My initial concern was that the request was for recordings and also for transcripts, and I thought it would require quite a bit of staff time to type it up,” McCarthy said Friday morning, adding that a City Hall employee recently spent the better part of a day transcribing a lengthy section of a recent council meeting.
“I wanted to be sure we knew what we were getting into,” McCarthy added.
The mayor also wrote in a recent email to Seligson that putting the recordings online might not be necessary as the public is already free to attend council meetings.
“I am not in favor of providing recordings of our meetings ‘available on-demand,’ since the whole point of having public meetings is so that the public can join us at our meetings in person,” wrote McCarthy, in the Aug. 8 email to Seligson.
City Clerk/Treasurer Debbie Mahler said the city staff found a service that would transcribe recordings of meetings for about $1 per minute, which was estimated to cost $5,000 annually.
Gill, who works in the information technology field for Whidbey Telecom and was the city’s volunteer IT professional, said the city already has all of the necessary technology to put its recordings online. They would essentially be a podcast, and Gill said staff would only need about 15 minutes of training.
By doing so, all comments made by the public would likely need to be made into a microphone, already set up in council chambers.
That had Councilwoman Robin Black worried. She said she had reservations about its possible chilling effect on citizens addressing the council and city administration. Gill countered that digital recordings are only a different offering, and that comments may still be submitted in writing.
“It doesn’t preclude anyone from participating because we can still take written comment,” he said.
Another concern was if audio recordings became part of the public record, and would need to be searched when a records request was submitted. Langley’s contracted attorney, Jeff Taraday of Lighthouse Law Group in Seattle, said the recordings would not need to be searched, but advised that the city make all of the minutes searchable to quickly identify if an audio recording was pertinent to a request.
McCarthy said he would speak with the other staff who may be required to handle the recordings and report to the council at a later date about implementing the podcast system.
