Still shot from The Hoover Channel video
The Hoover City Council meets at Hoover City Hall on Monday, Aug. 5, 2024.
The Hoover City Council on Monday night voted to begin livestreaming and recording all of its meetings in the council chambers in their entirety and keeping those videos on the city’s YouTube page for at least eight years.
The move is a reversal of a practice that began two years ago, when the city quietly stopped broadcasting and recording the public comment section of its council meetings and removed videos of council meetings after 60 days or after the minutes of those meetings are approved, whichever occurs later.
Council President John Lyda said two years ago the changes were a “compromise” policy that was created because council members were not in agreement about how long videos should be available for the public to review and whether the public comment section of the meeting should be recorded.
Lyda said then that council members’ opinions ranged from having no cameras at all to recording the meetings and keeping the recordings available forever, and he tried to find some middle ground.
“I’ve not seen an issue in my tenure as president where we’ve had as wide an array of opinions as we did on this matter,” Lyda said two years ago. “My goal was to draft a policy that no one loves but everyone can live with.”
However, a majority of council members said then they were surprised to learn that older meetings had been removed from public view and that general public comments were no longer being recorded. Council members said then they expected more discussion on the matter, but no changes were made for two years — until Monday night.
Robin Schultz, a Bluff Park resident who criticized the council decision two years ago, started livestreaming and recording the meetings himself and posting them on a YouTube page and Facebook page he created called The Hoover Channel. Schultz, who runs a computer repair, network and support business, also did some tech digging and found most of the old videos that had been deleted from the city’s YouTube page and posted them for public view and historical documentation.
Schultz also drafted a proposed ordinance for the council to vote on Monday night to begin livestreaming and recording meetings in their entirety and leaving them longer than 60 days. His initial ordinance would have left the videos online in perpetuity, but council members made it into a resolution and amended it to leave the videos up for only eight years.
Councilman Steve McClinton said he and Councilman Sam Swiney requested that the resolution be put on the council agenda.
McClinton noted that Lyda and City Attorney Philip Corley previously have commented that the city, even with its changes two years ago, was meeting the requirements of state law.
“But that’s otherwise known as the bare minimum, and we don’t go to restaurants or hotels to get the bare minimum. We expect more,” McClinton said. “So it should be with people’s city government.”
He noted that the new resolution also requires the city to maintain a link to those council meeting videos on its website, along with minutes of the meetings, for eight years.
Apryl Marie Fogel, a freelance reporter, talk radio host and publisher of an online publication called Alabama Today, told the council she doesn’t think the resolution goes far enough.
“I believe that this resolution should be tabled, if for no other reason than to strengthen it and not weaken it,” Fogel said. “I don’t think it goes far enough. There is no logical reason for an eight-year limit on maintaining the videos.”
People should be able to access videos and minutes of meetings in perpetuity, she said. Minutes of council meetings in recent years have become incredibly vague, and people deserve better, she said.
Former Hoover Council President Gene Smith said that, in the past, he has used council minutes from years past to help determine legislative intent when researching specific council actions and city issues, and the way the minutes are written today makes it hard to determine legislative intent. Having videos available for eight years is good, but sometimes he has had to go back 10 to 14 years to research issues, he said.
McClinton said he would like to see the YouTube video policy made stronger, too, but “I think now this is a consensus that the council can deal with and move forward.” He hopes a future City Council will improve the policy more, he said.
Schultz said he was glad to see the resolution approved but disappointed in the changes made to what he proposed. He noted two things that were deleted. One was a statement that “the city of Hoover is committed to promoting transparency and openness in government operations.” Another was a statement that “the minutes of all City Council meetings shall be written in a manner that is transparent, concise and clear. The minutes should accurately reflect the proceedings of the meeting without being vague, ensuring that the public can easily understand the decisions and actions taken by the council,” he said.
“Ironically, any sentence containing the word transparent or derivatives of that word were deleted from the final version,” Schultz said.
He may not continue livestreaming and recording the meetings himself if the city is going to do it, but he does plan to keep archiving them on The Hoover Channel, he said. “Because you deleted ’em once. You can do it again.”
See the full video from the Aug. 5 Hoover City Council meeting on The Hoover Channel YouTube page.
