What has often baffled me about Mayor TenHaken being this supposed tech geek is that he hasn’t embraced the simplest of technologies, that are ironically free. Cities across the nation have been using the FREE service of YouTube to stream their meetings (and keep a FREE record of them) for a long time. The South Dakota cities of Rapid City and Mitchell use the service. Locally the Minnehaha County Commission and the Sioux Falls School Board use it. Even the City of Sioux Falls has it’s own channel but only posts a handful of CityLink propaganda shows and a few press conferences preferring to stream only on Facebook (which you have to subscribe to).
Besides the fact that there is NO subscription required to watch the meetings on YouTube and the service is essentially FREE to the city and taxpayers, it helps with access and transparency. Also, increasingly, the service the city uses to stream official city council meetings, SIRE, is failing us, it has for over a decade and it is getting worse and worse. Last week only half of the informational was streamed live in SIRE and there was another meeting where only audio was working (I think it was the planning meeting).
Is YouTube perfect? No. But it has a good track record and seems to work just fine for thousands of other local governments across the country.
I told someone that the city has probably chosen to NOT use YouTube streaming because they can’t waste money on it and it wasn’t one of their new fangled ideas. In fact the former mayor had the media department purge hundreds of YouTube videos on their site before he left office. To this day we don’t know why.
But the real reason this mayor and his administration refuse to do this is because THEY HATE TRANSPARENCY AND OPEN GOVERNMENT.
Bottling up all that Hate Paul isn’t good for you . . . or us.