Cerro Gordo supervisors meetings soon to be broadcast on internet

MASON CITY — The meetings of the Cerro Gordo County Board of Supervisors will soon be broadcast online. The supervisors today approved the purchase of equipment to start the broadcasts.

IT director Ken Bahls says they’ll be using the same type of technology as other counties in the area by using a “Meeting Owl” to broadcast the meetings. “The idea would be is we would have an Owl camera that would rotate to whomever is speaking. The screen would come down so you’ll see what’s being broadcast. It would go live on our website. It would just be a (Microsoft) Teams meeting that people could sign into. They wouldn’t be able to participate, at least at this point they wouldn’t be able to do it. That’s under discussion for now. The meetings would be kept on the website for basically a month afterwards.”

Supervisor Carl Ginapp made broadcasting the meetings one of the priorities of his campaign and is happy to see the supervisors approve this next step in the process.  “I’m excited about this first step to increase transparency in our local government and I’m excited about that. I have researched that camera system with several different organizations, government organizations and private ones, and it seems to be very sufficient to do the job quality of audio and video is going to be everything we need, so I’m comfortable with it.”

The “Meeting Owl” technology costs about $1100 and the county will use existing computers to help with the meeting broadcasts. A start date for broadcasting the meetings was not immediately set.