SUNDRE – Residents will soon have the option to sit in on regular Town of Sundre council meetings from the comfort of their own home through the convenience of modern technology.
Several years after a suite of three high-definition webcams were installed in the municipal council’s chambers at a cost of approximately $65,000 that was offset largely by then-pandemic emergency funding, livestream broadcasts are expected to start next month.
“I’m going to try my best to have it up and running by June 9,” said Chris Albert, the town's director of corporate services.
Sundre joins other municipalities including Cremona, Didsbury, Olds, Mountain View County and Innisfail in offering the service.
Part of the delay previously stemmed from not having a fast enough internet service to ensure higher-quality and more consistent livestreams. But after fibre optic broadband infrastructure was introduced, there remained a few more hurdles.
“We were kind of more working on procedures and just trying to figure out how we could get it all to work,” Albert said on Thursday, May 22 during an interview.
Rather than using Zoom, which was propelled into popularity for conducting video-conference meetings during the pandemic and remains commonly used today, the municipality chose to use another service called EventLive.
“We’ll have a link on our website that people can click on, and it’ll take them basically right into the broadcast,” he said, adding the links will be made available on the morning when a council meeting is scheduled.
The intent was to keep the process as simple and user-friendly as possible.
“We opted to go with no registration required,” he said. “So anybody with the link can click it and go right into viewing the meeting.”
The move also factors into the municipality’s stated objectives of endeavouring to be more transparent and accessible.
Video of the meetings will not be recorded and posted online afterward, so residents who are interested in watching council proceedings will have to tune in live.
“It will be streamed as they’re happening,” he said, adding each broadcast will cease at the end of a meeting.
“And there’ll be a new link at the next council meeting. So, every council meeting will have its own unique link.”
Activating the cameras is not expected to be a trial run.
“This should be permanent,” he said, adding the two scheduled meetings in June are expected to be broadcast before council goes on hiatus for the summer.
“But we will pick it back up in September,” he said.
The only caveat is with the upcoming municipal election this fall, after which the new council could decide to make some changes, he said.
“But other than that, the plan is that this is going to be permanent.”
Procedurally speaking, Albert said members of council will have to bear in mind one of the biggest things to remember is ensuring their microphones are on when they’re speaking.
“Every once in a while, they don’t use their microphones,” he said, adding they can generally still be heard if attending the meeting in person.
“(But) with the webcams, you will not be able to hear them.”
Another procedural decision was to use only one camera that provides a panned-out view of council chambers, he said.
“It’s just a single camera that shows council,” he said.
“We won’t have a camera focused on the delegations. It’ll just be showing the back of the delegation,” he said.
“We opted to just stick with the one static view, rather than having it bounce between the three cameras. That gets more complicated.”
While there is an automatic setting that enables the cameras to focus on a person who is speaking with their mic on, there can be situations when the cameras get confused, he said.
“When multiple microphones get activated, the cameras don’t quite zoom in properly,” he said.
Additionally, it was decided the focus of council meetings should be on council itself.
“We didn’t want the cameras bouncing around between staff or accidentally showing public or anything like that,” he said.
“So we kind of opted for that single view.”
The municipality will also be able to track the number of viewers to gauge the level of participation, and the broadcasts will be considered successful even if there is only a handful of residents tuning in.
“If we get a few more people that are engaged, I don’t think that’s a bad thing,” he said.
Offering a parting thought, Albert mentioned another use of the webcams will be a monthly video recording of mayor Richard Warnock reading the regular Notes from the Mayor’s Desk newsletter that has traditionally been included in the town’s utility bills.
