Council to Post Committee Meetings On YouTube

Sept 22 2025 Committee Meeting, Owl News YouTube page

We heard at tonight’s council meeting that the City will start uploading committee meeting recordings to YouTube.

The Owl has been advocating for this for a long time.

Open committee meetings are public meetings that can only be viewed online via MS teams or watched in person at City Hall. They were recorded for later viewing for council members and staff ONLY. These meetings are usually held during the workday so there was in essence, no public access.

Committee meetings often get presentations that do not always get shown at Council meetings. The minutes of the meetings do not reflect the entirety of the conversations that were had. The minutes are merely someone's interpretation and some discussions do not get put in the minutes at all. The public has had to rely on what the news outlets published about them until Owl News decided the public had a right to these recordings. We started recording and uploading them to YouTube a few years ago, we have been the only news outlet that has done this.

We noticed that once it was known that we were recording these meetings that they started behaving a bit more professionally - one of the 2021 council members was actually caught on tape saying something disparaging about a resident - you can bet that never made it into the minutes.

(We recently put them behind a paywall because we noticed that the other news outlets were using them to write their own articles. We operate on a shoestring and do not have the resources that the other outlets do, if they want to use our product to do their job, they need to pay us.)