Can't make a Brown County Board meeting in person? Some supervisors call for livestreaming of meetings
GREEN BAY - If you want to tune in to the Brown County Board meeting, you'll have to make it to the monthly meeting. If you can't make it in person, you're out of luck.
Brown County does not provide recordings or livestreams of its County Board or committee meetings. If people want to stay apprised of board happenings but can't make it to the meeting, they have to rely on meeting minutes afterwards. However, the minutes don't provide a verbatim recap of conversations between board members.
But that could change. Three County Board members are asking the county to livestream or televise board meetings to make them more accessible to residents.
It's not a new matter for the county. It briefly had a virtual option to watch board meetings in 2016 but that only lasted for about a year before the meetings stopped getting posted.
County Board members Patrick Evans, Megan Borchardt, and Jessica Adams want to start livestreaming permanently. The county discussed the possibility June 11 during the Executive Committee meeting.
Next, the county will put together information on how much it would cost and any additional technology that may be needed.
Here is what to know about why County Board members are spearheading the discussions now, some of the barriers, and how to tune into meetings.
Some say it's a matter of transparency
Evans said it was the right time to bring the issue back to the forefront of the board and start fresh with the newly formed County Board following the April election and a relatively new meeting space for the board, in the lower level of the Brown County Central Library.
Evans, Borchardt and Adams brought up the request at the April County Board meeting.
It's important to make the meetings more available to residents because that's where the "nuts and bolts of everything happens," Evans said in an interview with the Press-Gazette.
"We don't have a closed government," Evans said. "We need to be as open and as public as we possibly can."
People can always read the minutes, which are posted in the next couple days after the night of the meeting and includes votes and actions taken, but they don't always include the discussions held or detailed actions. Meanwhile, Green Bay posted its June 11 City Council meeting to YouTube the day after the meeting.
Borchardt told the Press-Gazette she has heard from many people who want to know more about the meetings beyond what is included in minutes.
"People have busy lives," Borchardt said. "It doesn't mean they don't want to be involved."
Do people want it? Some board members don't think so.
At the Executive Committee meeting on June 11, some County Board members had different ideas on whether residents would want a virtual option to watch the board meetings. Some, including Evans, Borchardt, and Adams, said the interest was still strong and had never gone away after the county's previous attempt to post meetings as part of NEWEye Brown County in 2016.
Evans said many people in his district continue to ask him about where to find the meetings online and if there will be a video option.
Adams said the demand for it was high when she was elected to the board two years ago and it was still a request from her constituents, noting the expansion of remote work and technology during the pandemic strengthened the drive and capabilities to put meetings online.
County Board Chairman Patrick Buckley and board member Ron Antonneau aren't so sure. Antonneau and Buckley said they haven't heard such demand from people, while Buckley said it should be part of a larger conversation about how the county structures its minutes.
"They don't want to hear more politicians talk," Antonneau said.
Brown County Executive Troy Streckenbach agrees that "having access is a priority" but said following the small viewership from previous efforts including NEWEye Brown County, which posted and broadcast meetings from the county and four Green Bay suburbs, made members of the county question if it was a valuable investment for Brown County.
"We have all these critical aspects that require funding," Streckenbach said in an interview. "We made an effort."
What's stopping Brown County from livestreaming?
The county went online for a bit before the pandemic. It launched monthly livestreams of County Board meetings in 2016 with NEWEye which also included Allouez, Ashwaubenon, Howard and Lawrence meetings.
But the system survived for only a little over a year. Videos of committee meetings started posting more sporadically on the website and county officials said the problems were because of time and low staffing of NEWEye. At one point, fewer than a quarter of Brown County's meetings were available on the platform. The effort cost taxpayers a total of around $85,000 to operate — the county covered about $22,000, while the involved suburbs covered the rest.
It's unclear how much it would cost to livestream now or to add video technology to the board's library space that would allow some form of recording. The Executive Committee requested IT and county clerk's office put together information on the costs and what equipment would be needed to add an online component. Members of the Executive Committee asked for information on how other municipalities were posting meetings and what their audience levels are.
The videos were ultimately scrapped in November 2017. The county decided to take down the videos, citing they required captions to comply with the Americans with Disabilities Act. The federal law requires local and state government to make services accessible to everyone, including people with disabilities, though a Press-Gazette review of recordings from other municipalities in the county found some don't provide captions.
To make the videos accessible to people who are deaf or hard of hearing, Brown County Corporation Counsel David Hemery decided in October 2017 that the county needed to caption all of its videos of meetings and advised the county to stop providing access to uncaptioned videos in case of liability.
In 2020, the board met in-person at larger sites in the county that allowed for social distancing including the Resch Center, Resch Expo and the Radisson Hotel & Conference Center, with a virtual option for the public to tune into at the time of the meeting. People could use a link to access audio and video of the meeting or speak during public comment at the start of meetings.
In 2021, the board found a home for its meetings in the lower level of the Brown County Central Library and started regularly meeting there instead of Green Bay City Hall. After moving to the library, the board has not been streaming or broadcasting County Board or committee meetings.
Brown County Director of Administration Chad Weininger said Tuesday that software would need to be installed in the library space for livestreaming.
Other Green Bay-area governments post videos, recordings
A Press-Gazette review of village boards and city councils in Brown County found that most municipalities have an online version of their meetings but not all of them include captions.
De Pere: City Council and committee meetings are streamed live through a webcast.
Green Bay: City Council and committee meetings are streamed live on YouTube.
Allouez: An MP3 audio recording is posted after each Village Board meeting.
Ashwaubenon: All Village Board and committee meetings are posted on YouTube.
Bellevue: Village Board meetings are streamed through Facebook Live.
Denmark: No online option.
Hobart: No online option.
Howard: No online option.
Pulaski: No online option.
Suamico: Village Board meetings are streamed on YouTube.
Wrightstown: People can join virtually during the meeting.
Surrounding Brown County county boards are split on if they post meetings online.
Kewaunee: County Board and a couple committees' videos are on YouTube.
Oconto: No online option.
Shawano: Audio recordings of County Board meetings are available through May 2023 on the county website.
Outagamie: No online option.
Calumet: County Board meetings are streamed on a webcast.
Manitowoc: County Board meetings are streamed on YouTube.
Benita Mathew is a health and county government reporter for the USA TODAY NETWORK-Wisconsin. Contact her at bmathew@gannett.com.
This article originally appeared on Green Bay Press-Gazette: Three Brown County Board members call for livestreaming of meetings
