Hackensack council meetings now available online, TV to followTuesday, July 30, 2013
BY HANNAN ADELY
STAFF WRITER
The Record
HACKENSACK — Calls for city government to televise public meetings had seemed to fall on deaf ears, until now: The City Council has started posting its meetings online and expects to air them on cable television soon.
Citizen activists, including people who now sit on the council, had clamored for televised meetings for years, to no avail. The members of the council, most of whom are serving for the first time since the May election, pledged in their campaign to televise meetings and made webcasts one of their first acts in office.
The first video on the city's website was of the council's July 1 swearing-in ceremony and reorganization meeting, followed by its July 22 council meeting, posted Monday. The council is working out details to have its regular meetings aired on television, Mayor John Labrosse said.
"We promised this in our campaign and we will come through with it," Labrosse said. "It will be nice for the citizens to be able to hear and see what is going on in their government."
City residents said the change would help them stay informed and allow for more transparency.
"It's about time," said Regina DiPasqua, a regular at council meetings who once recorded meetings herself, but stopped because of the time and effort it took.
Residents' calls for televised meetings grew in the past few years as problems mounted in City Hall, with numerous lawsuits and the arrest of the police chief. The previous council had formed a committee to explore televising meetings and to get quotes from vendors, but the change never happened.
The new council will consider options and costs to record and air meetings at its Aug. 19 workshop meeting, said City Manager Stephen Lo Iacono.
The city hired a cameraman at a cost of $385 per event to record the last meeting, said Alfred Dib, the city's information specialist.
The city can continue employing him, or could spend about $1,400 for a mounted camera and $600 for computer storage to capture meetings without manpower, he said.
Although the automatic video camera would save money, the quality would suffer, said Dib, who says it looks like video from a security camera.
Dib said he believed more people would watch the videos online, where they could view them anytime.
The videos can be viewed on the city's website,
www.hackensack.org, by selecting the "video" tab on the left-hand column, or they can be viewed directly on youtube.com.
"The Internet is a better way to do it, but we're going to try to do both," Dibs said.
Kathleen Salvo, a citizen activist, welcomed the recording of meetings and said she hoped more people would take an interest in local government as a result.
"It will get more people involved and get more people curious," she said.
Email: adely@northjersey.com
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