College Park City Council Meetings to Be Streamed Online

College Park residents will soon be able to view city council meetings without leaving their computers. According to College Park City Clerk Janeen Miller, regular meetings of the city council will be streamed on the Internet starting in October.  The city has entered into an agreement with the San Francisco-based company Granicus to perform the task.

"We are now in the deployment stage," Miller said.

Initially, only the city council meetings themselves - held on the second and fourth Tuesdays of the month - will be available for streaming.  The council work sessions - held on the first and third Tuesdays of the month - will come later.  Because council members sit elsewhere in the council chamber during worksessions, additional cameras need to be added before they can be streamed, Miller said. Plans to make the necessary adjustments to the audio-video equipment are expected to take place soon, she said, and that ideally, the work sessions will be streamed by January.

According to the city's director of finance, Steven Groh, the cost to the city for streaming regular council meetings for this year will be $4900; a whole year will be $6468.

The streamed sessions will be archived, and interested citizens can go to the City of College Park website to view them anytime.

"Constituents want better access to city council meetings. They want to see them on the Internet and they want to have the ability to play them back later," said Miller. "It's all about more openness," she said. 

City Council member Chris Nagle is a major proponent for the streaming of council meetings as well as for the upgrade of the audio-video equipment in the council chamber. She said that she advocated the projects because they will lead to better communication with the public.

"I've received complaints that residents who attended meetings couldn't hear what was going on," she said."The upgrade of the audio-video system will help to alleviate that problem." Nagle added that she had watched the web streaming offered by other city governments in Maryland such as Greenbelt and Takoma Park and was impressed with the concept.

Other cities in Maryland that Granicus is providing streaming services for include Bowie, Brunswick, Frederick, Greenbelt, Rockville, Takoma Park and Thurmont.

The streaming of regular council meetings as well as an archive of previous streamed meetings will be available through the city's website at www.collegeparkmd.gov.