Bluff Park man creates The Hoover Channel to archive council meeting videos

When the city of Hoover removed at least five years’ worth of Hoover City Council and zoning board meetings from the city’s YouTube channel last year and stopped livestreaming and recording the general public comment portion of each council meeting, it bothered Bluff Park resident Robin Schultz.

It bothered him so much that Schultz — who runs a computer repair, network and website support business — did some tech digging and found most of the videos online in a place where most people wouldn’t know to look.

He then created a new website, YouTube channel and Facebook page called The Hoover Channel and put all the old City Council meeting videos online again so everyone can have access to them. The Hoover Channel went live on Jan. 26.

He believes the videos serve an important role to document history and to help hold city officials accountable for things they have said and done, he said. “Transparency is really what it boils down to,” said Schultz, who unsuccessfully ran for Hoover City Council in 2016 and 2020.

At first, that was all Schultz planned to do. But then he decided to bring his own video camera to the council meeting and record the entirety of each action meeting, including the public comment period at the end of the meeting that the council was no longer recording.

Council President John Lyda and some other council members said they didn’t think it was important for cameras to record general comments that the public had to say, although several other council members said they preferred for public comments to be livestreamed and recorded.

No city official has taken responsibility for the initial decision to remove the videos or quit recording public comments, but Lyda drafted a “compromise” policy after the fact that allows for videos of council action meetings to stay online for 60 days or until after those minutes are approved, whichever occurs later.

But after those 60 days, the videos disappear.

Schultz started downloading a copy of the city’s recorded videos before they are deleted and adding them to The Hoover Channel. However, because more recently there has been a day’s delay in the recorded videos being available on the city’s YouTube channel, Schultz started posting his own recordings instead.

While Schultz does come to council meetings, he doesn’t make the recordings himself. His 14-year-old grandson, Jackson, works part-time for him and is handling the video recordings.

Schultz does the formatting of the videos and downloads them to The Hoover Channel. It takes him about 2½ hours after each meeting, he said.

Schultz said he got the idea for The Hoover Channel from a similar effort at the state level by the League of Women Voters Alabama Education Fund. That organization created The Alabama Channel to archive meetings of the Alabama Legislature. The Legislature livestreams its meetings but doesn’t record them for future viewing, so the League of Women Voters Alabama Education Fund does.

“We believe every citizen should have access to not only live but recorded footage of legislative meetings,” the organization says on The Alabama Channel website.

The state meetings are not just available for viewing. Through a partnership with a Colorado-based organization called the Open Media Foundation, the Alabama legislative videos on The Alabama Channel are searchable so people can more quickly locate discussions of particular bills or issues.

Schultz said he contacted the Open Media Foundation and plans to enter a similar partnership that will allow people to search videos for discussion of certain topics. The partnership also will allow him to post meeting agendas, copies of ordinances, resolutions and agreements being considered, and meeting minutes, he said.

“It’s super cool. I’m pretty pumped about it,” Schultz said.

Visit The Hoover Channel at thehooverchannel.org, or look for it on YouTube or Facebook.