Story posted Wednesday, June 17, 2009
Resident Volunteers To Help Webcast Meetings
Webcasting of Park Ridge City Council meetings is still planned, but there are more details for people to work out before it happens.
"This is still a work in progress," said Mayor Dave Schmidt at the meeting on Monday, June 15.
George Kirkland, a resident, presented research he conducted trying to determine costs to the city for the project. "We are going to need somebody that's going to mount the camera at the beginning of the meeting and turn it on," he explained. "At the end of the meeting, take it down and plug it into a computer so it can start its download of the data."
Kirkland said he has a Web site and volunteered to post the videos on it so there would be no expense to the city for that part of the endeavor. "Unless you decided that you wanted to have your Web site provide a link to the actual recording, that would be another five minutes," he said.
Schmidt explained Kirkland was one of a group of residents volunteering to handle much of the work for the project. He explained the city could take control of whatever parts of the project it wanted. "That's an offer in case we don't do it ourselves," he said.
Kirkland also asked the council to come up with a way for Schmidt to forego his salary as he promised during his campaign. Due to withholding and Schmidt's tax bracket, he cannot return the entire salary to city projects. The council may still try to rewrite the ordinance to allow an elected official a means to refuse payment.
"I figured if I couldn't give them the money back, I'd simply spend it on something the city needs," Schmidt said.
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