Council Will Videotape, Stream Meetings Live

The council that did an about-face Tuesday evening, voting unanimously in favor of spending thousands to not only tape, but to stream the meetings online.

In the near future, anyone with an Internet connection will be able to watch live broadcasts of public meetings held by the Lake Forest City Council and its advisory commissions, or watch archived tapes of past meetings.

The Lake Forest council agreed to spend about $500 for a videocamera and about $1,000 to mount it on the ceiling in its chambers at  where it will capture meetings as they occur.

Council members debated whether to invest in a more expensive videocamera, like the $2,500 camera in use at , but eventually voted to spend not more than $500.

To store videos of recorded meetings, the council also voted to purchase software that will host an online archive of meeting videos, searchable by keyword so the public will be able to pinpoint a section of interest rather than having to listen to the entire meeting.

One-time start-up costs for the software will cost the city about $8,460. The annual cost for hosting the online video files in subsequent years will be $6,400, according to city staffers.

The move is a stopgap measure to cover the three or four years left until the city administration relocates from its current site, a leased building on Commercentre Drive, to its permanent home, .

A "state-of-the-art" video system will be installed in the new building, which the city will own, said . 

But for now, the ceiling-mounted camera will do, the council decided.

The council typically meets the first and third Tuesday of every month at City Hall; the public portion of the meeting begins at 7 p.m. and generally lasts multiple hours.

The discussion about videotaping meetings of the council and city commissions came at the end of the council's annual budget workshop, at which it reviewed the city's budget for the next fiscal year.