It's showtime all the time with new service
BY PATRICIA A. MILLER Staff Writer

ANDREW MILLER staff Members of Glimmergrass play to a crowd at Country Music Night, the last SummerFest night of the season. The event was held at Windward Beach off Princeton Avenue.

BRICK TOWNSHIP - Want to watch a Township Council meeting at 2 a.m.?

Brick residents no longer have to wait for scheduled broadcasts of Township Council meetings on BTV 20. They can watch meetings, or portions of meetings, any time they want to simply by accessing the township Web site at www.twp.brick.nj.us. and clicking on the "video meeting archive" section to the right of the screen.

"Now they can see exactly what is said, the tone in which it was said," Council President Stephen C. Acropolis said. "No longer will people have to depend on the town crier, rumors, propaganda, or a two-sentence quote in a statewide newspaper. They can now link to a township Web site and see exactly what [Township Attorney] Jean Cipriani said, how she said it and what she said. You've got it word for word. You can actually watch the meeting."

The meeting videos will also be "timestamped" sometime in the near future, said Township Clerk Virginia Lampman.

That means residents can click their way to a certain item on the agenda, instead of having to watch all the items that preceded what they are interested in, she said.

"We are going to start time-stamping it for the items on the agenda, like resolutions and discussion,'" Lampman said. "It's going to be great. I think it's going to work really well. It's going to be very convenient."

The new service means residents who do not have cable access to BTV20 will no longer be at a disadvantage, Acropolis said.

"You can now log on to the Internet and watch a council meeting," he said. "You don't have to download anything."

Brick is the first municipality in the state to launch a live and on-demand Web-casting portal powered by Granicus Inc., a San Francisco-based company that provides local government streaming media solutions, said Granicus spokesperson Lauren Alexander.

"It's turning out even better than we expected," Acropolis said. "It's part of our ongoing effort to open up the government. In the past, many people did not want to put council meetings on TV."

The township paid Granicus $9,640 in start-up costs and will pay $684 a month for storage and distribution management, proactive support, 24/7 system monitoring, and continuous software updates for the service.

Residents need a broadband Internet connection, not dial-up, to take advantage of the new feature, and the proper computer equipment, Lampman said

Residents must have at least a 233 MHz Pentium II processor, a sound card, 64 MB of RAM and a minimum of 56 Kbps Internet connection to be able to access the meetings. Macintosh computers need a G3 system or newer, with Mac OS X installed. A Windows Media Player version 9 or higher is required, according to the township Web site.

Lampman and Councilwoman Ruthanne Scaturro approached council members about Granicus after they saw the technology demonstrated at the annual League of Municipalities convention in Atlantic City, Acropolis said.

Township officials eventually hope to offset the cost of the monthly Granicus fee with sponsorships, he said.

"Hopefully, that will be free at some point," he said. "That's just part of running the town a little bit more like a business."

Eventually Planning Board and Board of Adjustment meetings will also be put on the Web site, Acropolis said.

"Anything that goes on in an official capacity in town hall," he said. "There's no reason why you can't do it for such a low price, compared to what it was a couple of years ago."

Acropolis said he had asked "every single year" since 2000 if meetings could be televised. He said he was told that if residents were concerned about their local government, they would come to the meetings.

Both Acropolis and then-Mayor Joseph C. Scarpelli said in 2004 they agreed that council meetings should be taped. But Scarpelli said he was concerned that residents might abuse the service by using the camera as a soapbox.

Acropolis pushed for both the business and public sections of meetings to be televised.

Scarpelli won an unprecedented fourth term as mayor in 2006, narrowly beating out Acropolis. Scarpelli resigned last December. He pleaded guilty in federal court in January to accepting at least $5,000 in bribes from an unnamed developer. His sentencing was postponed for the second time last week. No new date has been set.