ThisWeek CW 11/2/2011
Canal Winchester’s Town Hall is receiving audio and video upgrades, all thanks to in-house expertise.
“This is going to cost us around $15,000, thanks to (City Water Reclamation manager) Steve Smith and (city information technology contractor) Rick Brown from Maximation donating time to do the installation,” public works director Matt Peoples said. “The quotes we’d gotten were going to be about $15,000 just to upgrade the audio equipment.”
To keep costs down, the city is taking advantage of Smith’s experience with audio equipment.
“Steve knows sound equipment and has a lot of contacts in the business,” Peoples said. “The key is that we all know our limits and trust each other to know when we can do something and when we can’t.
“For instance, we used to have our own paving machine, but we don’t do it often enough to be good at it, so (we) sold it and have a contractor do that work for us for much less overall cost.”
According to Peoples, Smith and Brown started the audio and video upgrades following the city meetings on Monday, Oct. 24, with a goal of completing the work prior to the finance committee meeting at 6 p.m. on Monday, Nov. 7.
“We’ve started on the upgrade and it’s going forward, although there’s still some details to work out,” he said. “The desks at Town Hall are now an ‘L’ shape instead of a U shape É The audio base will remain in the same location as it currently is in and the videoscreen installation will rely on how we have to run the cables.”
Peoples said the current audio system, which uses cassette tapes as the recording medium, isn’t broken but is getting more difficult to support because there are fewer options for purchasing the tapes. Plus, he said, the system provides poor quality recording of meetings, in part because the microphones don’t work well enough.
“We’ve wanted to do this for a couple years, because at some point, it will cause a public records problem and you can’t hear people speaking a lot of times during meetings,” Peoples said.
The new system will be fully digital, according to Peoples, with the majority of the cost going into the microphones.
“It’s going to be a happy day to have this done with the new, reliable equipment. You’ll be able to hear the meetings a lot better and the transcriptions of the minutes will be much, much clearer,” Peoples said.