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WE WANT CHANNEL 25 BACK!
Channel 25, the dedicated television channel devoted to recording and playing video and sound presentations of Lake Geneva city meetings, is currently not in use. The channel is still dedicated but nothing is being presented. Instead, people who want to see what’s going on are being redirected to Vimeo on the Internet, even though the prime audience reviewing city meetings without attending in person are not that Internet savvy or caring about going there.
The Lake Geneva city hall chamber has new video and audio capabilities, however, and that’s what’s created this situation. The long overdue upgrade of the AV equipment in city hall has finally become operational. The improvement is substantial. The video is clearer and can focus on whoever is speaking at the moment, with a 3-5 second delay. All public comments from people standing before the council or other committee meeting members are now filmed from the front, so the public can see the face of the speaker. There are no more back-of-the-head shots or any of that. The audio is unmeasurably better. The voices are clear and legible, and there’s no crackling or cutting out like was customary with the old system. All in all, this system has been money well spent and was very much needed.
The public should be able to access all city meetings online, however, standing committee meetings are the only ones filmed at this time. This may change shortly, depending on where Todd Krause can find money in the budget. The additional equipment needed to make it possible for this new highly effective equipment to communicate and therefore allow presentations to become visible and audible on Channel 25 is said to cost an additional $40,000. Lake Geneva city officials have not seriously addressed this issue yet, and when this situation was presented to the FLR commission last week, it was discussed that Channel 25 might never be connected because of that cost. That’s not going to work. The Geneva Lake area is no longer a backwoods rural area mildly visited by people who’ve lived around the lake or somehow found it accidentally.
It’s now a developing city and a tourist attraction that’s soon to be the largest in the state of Wisconsin. The Geneva Shore Reports attends some meetings in person and records some of the more important meetings but can’t be there all the time and then be responsible for vitally informing the public on every issue. The public deserves to have serious consideration in finding the funding to allow it to be fully and immediately informed without having to find the meetings on the Internet. Older citizens at home, in particular, are not that adept at working with computers or accessing streaming programs or apps on the Internet, yet many of them make up the majority of citizens really paying attention and paying the bills. The new leadership that came in like a warm welcome wind (Mayor Todd Krause, and the new city council members) must meet and consider this Channel 25 issue a major one. The very people who voted overwhelmingly to put them in office are reading this and nodding heads, one after another. They not only need and want to know…they have the right to demand to know, and Channel 25 is how they will hopefully get to know.
