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Fort Fairfield to Stream Town Council Meetings Online

 

Fort Fairfield Journal, June 22, 2016

 

   The Town of Fort Fairfield, in an effort to keep citizens informed and connected, has contracted with Town Hall Streams to provide streaming and playback access to Town Council meetings. Moving forward, anyone who wants to watch Council meetings as they occur can visit http://townhallstreams.com/locations/fort-fairfield-me and view meetings in progress from anywhere with an Internet connected device. In addition, citizens and interested parties will be also able to stream meetings that have concluded as they will be stored on the Town Hall Streams server for playback anytime.

   As a result of this change, residents will no longer be able to watch Town Council meetings on the town’s Public Access Channel. Public announcements and information will continue to be provided on the Public Access Channel.

   “While this change may impact a few folks negatively, it will allow increased access to our meetings for many,” stated Town Manager, Jim Risner. “With the old system, only residents with cable could watch the meetings and they could only watch them live, as they happened, at six o’clock on the third Wednesday of the month. Now, these meetings will stream live over the Internet, which is available to many more homes. But the biggest benefit of this move is that the meetings will be recorded and available for playback on demand at a time and place that is convenient for residents.”

   Recordings of meetings will be stored on the Town Hall Streams server, and will be kept available to access for a minimum of five years. After that, the meetings will be downloaded and kept on file in accordance with Maine law.

   Individuals who do not have access to the internet at their homes may view the meetings on the computers at the Fort Fairfield Public Library.

   Town Hall Streams is a Maine-based company that was created to provide simple, low cost and effective solutions for towns to stream live and archive meetings and provides services to dozens of municipalities, authorities, and school districts throughout the Northeast.

   The Fort Fairfield Journal will continue to provide free, compressed MP3 audio streams of most town council meetings, at no charge to the town, for those who do not have access to the higher speed internet data rates necessary for video streams.

   For more information, please contact Tim Goff at 472-3802 or tgoff@fortfairfield.org