That is a very good question. If you go to the video page, it is non-existant. I sent this email to councilors Staggers and Jamison last night;
I noticed on Tuesday that the informational meeting stopped it’s (internet) feed at about 15 minutes into the meeting, and I have noticed that it is not available on the city website.
I don’t contact the clerk’s office about this stuff anymore, because they just ignore me (gee I wonder why). But citizens pay dearly for this service, and it needs to start working. Enough of the glitches and excuses.
I often find it ironic these ‘glitches’ occur during controversial topics. I hope that this is not a coincidence.
Actually, I don’t think this is coincidence. I used to blame it on incompetence, but not anymore. Why?
• I have complained to the clerk’s office and city councilors about the video feed missing several times in the past.
• How can Channel 16 televise these meetings with no problem, but that same taped meeting cannot be streamed online immediately?
• How can a meeting be missing for several days or even weeks then suddenly show up? Where was the archive hiding?
• If the company we hired to handle the online videos, SIRE, is responsible for these problems, they either need to be fired or they need to give taxpayers a refund. They are not providing a service to us properly.
I thoroughly understand that issues can occur with the great internets. But the clerk’s office has had plenty of time to fix this issue with no avail. An assistant city clerk advised me once to watch the meeting on Channel 16. First off, I don’t have cable, and secondly that is not the solution. Citizens should be able to access these meetings anytime they want to. I also find it very strange these ‘glitches’ occur whenever there is a controversial topic.
I’m sure the meeting will ‘magically’ show up today after city employees have their morning reading of the DaCola, but it shouldn’t work this way. A blogger shouldn’t have to piss and moan about this week after week. We have $180 million for a new events center and hundreds of thousands of dollars for spray parks and monkey spas, we should have money allocated for transparency and public access to information.
15 minutes in and the feed goes tits up? Right when Tim is about to scold mmm and his minions? Coincidence? I hardly think so. Used to think so. Not no more.
Clarification, this happened during the INFORMATIONAL, not the regular city council meeting and that meeting does work.
Now, 41 hours AFTER the Informational meeting, the video is available, But not the minutes………
BAHAHAHA! Only hours after I bitch the meeting shows up. Too funny.
From the city clerk;
“This Informational Meeting was on line Wednesday morning, however, we discovered there was an issue with the audio and video (either no audio and/or the video speeding up) on the SIRE site. We took the meeting off SIRE to take corrective action. Our IT Analyst has been working on this since the issue was discovered and in technical terms, “. . . a new video had to be encoded into a specified format and this had to be encoded with Microsoft’s Expression’s Encoder and then encoded with SIRE’s encoder software again.” He has kept the notes in case this issue would arise in the future. The meeting is back on SIRE and working correctly.”
Apparently encoding videos takes days. Who knew?