By Megan Wehring
KYLE — Kyle City Council approved an agreement with Swagit Productions, LLC, to provide the public with a more user-friendly platform for virtual city meetings.
The city council currently uses NovusAGENDA where the public can view the agenda, recordings and any additional information of each meeting. However, the system has proven to have more prolonged issues than convenience.
“The service is incrementally a little bit more than what we are paying for NovusAGENDA,” Jennifer Holm, City Secretary, told the council. “We’ve had a lot of issues with NovusAGENDA over the last couple of years. Things where videos got swapped with other entities.”
Residents will still be able to view city council and other meetings on Spectrum 10 when the new service is installed. Council member Tracy Scheel questioned if the service would fix any current sound or video quality issues. Holm did not have a definitive answer.
“I know that on channel 10 we’ve had issues with the picture being cropped on the TV and then having to crank up the TV to 100 to hear,” Scheel said.
Virtual transparency and accessibility has played a major part this year since more people have elected to stay at home to attend meetings. Council member Dex Ellison said a new platform can bring more innovation to the city while still providing residents the resources they need.
“At the end of the day, this is a big part of our communication with our citizenry,” Ellison said. “As much as we can be leading edge, innovative and ahead of the game on that. I think that shined a bright light this year and how beneficial it was.”
Searchability is one of the major selling points. Features of the services that will be implemented include a keyword search; this would allow both residents and staff to search keywords or topics within a video recording for easy access. According to Holm, the city is currently limited to using the minutes in NovusAGENDA to find what is discussed at each meeting.
There is not an anticipated launch date for the service at this time.
