Sundre council recently started tossing ideas around to make its meetings more transparent and available to the public.
Administrative staff have taken a cursory review to investigate "the possibility of bringing in video for taping council meetings and then somehow broadcasting it out to the community," said Vic Pirie, director of finance and administration, during council's Feb. 21 workshop.
The Municipal Government Act allows for local governments to take such measures towards being as open and transparent as possible, he said.
"A number of different communities throughout Alberta do broadcast their council meetings live," he said, citing Red Deer and Calgary as examples.
However, the Town of Sundre does not have sufficient Internet speeds or bandwidth to offer a similar live service, he added.
"We don't have enough ability under the current system to be able to do that."
Yet some alternative options might include making recorded council meetings available online, he said.
"So that's something we can certainly look at getting into down the road."
But a major factor would be the cost of obtaining the equipment to do so, he said, adding the 2017-18 budget has no such considerations included.
"It's something that we can go forward with the new council that's elected in the fall to see if there's still a desire to do that."
Additionally, depending what happens with council's effort to introduce broadband, "we may be in a position down the road to broadcast live."
So council might consider directing administration to highlight the project and include it for further investigation in future budgets, he said.
Coun. Chris Vardas, who had previously brought up the subject for further discussion with his colleagues, said even without sufficient bandwidth to broadcast live, the municipality should at least upload recordings to its official website.
"It doesn't have to be live," he said.
"People should be able to see why we made the decisions we did and how we came to these conclusions."
Addressing the cost concern, the councillor suggested using a technology as simple as a webcam to record videos of meetings.
"In this day and age, we should try to find some way to put it out to our public ó our residents ó as soon as possibleÖat least it's showing that we're making an effort to show our residents the decisions we're making."
Pirie said that's certainly a project administration could look into further.
"It's all about transparency," said Vardas, going on to suggest at least a sound recording could be possible if video is out of reach for the foreseeable future.
Mayor Terry Leslie inquired how many official requests from the public there have been to make available recordings of council meetings, to which Pirie said he was unaware of any.
However, Coun. Cheri Funke added she has heard from people who have expressed a desire to see the meetings but are unable to attend in person.
