The majority of the Ansonia Aldermen voted Oct. 9 to stop recording their meetings on video.
The motion was made by Alderman Edward Adamowski, who said the meetings, which are recorded by Alderman John Marini, were supposed to be aired on the Comcast local access channel. However, the vast majority of the meetings have not been aired, Adamowski pointed out.
Marini explained that technical issues have hampered his efforts to get the videos on television. The Aldermen meetings are about three hours long. A single DVD holds about two hours, Marini said. So, three hours of meetings requires a second DVD be delivered in order for Comcast to air the entire meeting.
However, Comcast’s automated broadcast system can’t air more than one DVD for a given program. Ansonia meetings have to be shorter or Marini has to explore how to compress more hours of video onto a single DVD.
Adamowski and Alderman Robert Duffus suggested Marini give the partial meetings to Comcast. Marini said he preferred to have the entire meeting aired.
Adamowski said the city was spending money on the recording but not airing the meetings. Marini said the money comes from his own pocket.
Marini said he has been trying to find a way to resolve the technical issue.
After the majority of the board voted to stop recording, Marini said he would ask a volunteer — possibly from the Ansonia Town Republican Committee — to record the next meeting.
“The (DVDs) are made available to anyone who wants to see them. It’s important to at least preserve them as a record and make them available,” he said.
Eugene Sharkey, president of the Board of Aldermen, said board-authorized recordings would stop until the city could figure out a solution to the technical problem.
Marini, a Republican, told the Valley Indy the Democrats on the board have been uncomfortable about having the meetings recorded from the start. A move to post the videos on the web was met with resistance because officials feared the recordings would be altered and used by a third party.
David Knapp, Marini’s Democratic counterpart in the city’s Seventh Ward, said in an e‑mail the Democrats “are not afraid nor do we have anything to hide.”
Marini had several months to broadcast the meetings on Comcast and it just hasn’t happened, Knapp said. He said Marini should have called a meeting of a Video Recording subcommittee to discuss the issue.
“The videotaping is a little pet project of Marini’s,” he said.
Recording government meetings and broadcasting them on local access cable has been a regular practice in countless towns across the U.S. since cable television became commonplace in the 1980s.
