VCTV ends live Council coverage

By Abigail Popple, Local Journalism Initiative Reporter, RMG

251 meetings, four council terms, and 12 years of dedication: after covering nearly every open meeting of Council since 2013, Valemount Community TV (VCTV) Station Manager Michael Peters is putting a wrap on live council coverage. Recordings of Council meetings will still be re-broadcasted on channel 7/653 at 8:00 p.m. on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays, but Peters will no longer attend Council meetings to livestream them himself.

Peters informed Council of this decision in a letter ahead of the March 25th meeting – the final meeting he recorded himself. He wrote that the station made the decision to end live coverage because the video equipment installed in council chambers last year has lower quality than VCTV’s own equipment, and because the station feels it is more appropriate for Village staff to be responsible for recording meetings.

In an interview with The Goat, Peters said it is somewhat unusual for a third party to be responsible for streaming and archiving government meetings – and even more unusual now that the Village has its own video equipment. Additionally, the Village’s equipment is not ideal for live productions as it lags when cutting between camera angles, he said. 

The TV station and Village staff have spent the past year ironing out the kinks to the audio/visual system in Council chambers and preparing to have staff handle the technology by themselves, Peters added.

“We felt they should be self-sufficient – they shouldn’t be relying on a community TV station to do that on their behalf, they should have their own control over it and their own autonomy,” Peters said. “But we’ve always been great partners, we’ve always done this as a free public service.”

Peters’ commitment to this public service is so strong that when he first moved to Valemount from Vancouver without a car, he biked to Council meetings from the station’s office on Gorse Street, three cameras in tow.

“It was pretty intense,” he laughed. “But you do what you need to do. I think Council meetings are an important public service – we’re a community TV station, so of course we want to be involved with that.”

Having been a fly on the wall for nearly every open meeting of Council since 2013 – Peters says he only missed six meetings held via Zoom during the COVID-19 pandemic – he has watched civic participation ebb and flow, with some meetings garnering dozens of attendees. While today’s meetings often only have two or three participants in the gallery, the service that VCTV coverage provides is no less crucial, Peters said.

“I’ve always looked at it as, it’s the public’s right to know,” he said. “Unless you’re going to build a hall that houses a thousand people so the whole town can come out, some people are never going to be in that council chamber.”

Since its inception in the late 80s, the Valemount Entertainment society has provided the only word-for-word account of many Council meetings, according to Peters. While he is not sure how often previous station managers covered the meetings, he said the Society’s archives provide a valuable record of meetings going back decades.

“It really is a verbatim record,” Peters said. “I’ve got DVDs on the shelf from 2012 of every single council meeting for data and historical records. We’ll continue to store that stuff and have it here if anybody ever wants it.”

With that goal of transparency and accuracy in mind, the station can assist the Village with the transition if necessary, said Peters. However, some Village staff have already been trained on how to use the video equipment in council chambers, according to CAO Anne Yanciw. There will not be any financial implications to having staff livestream the meetings as they already attend Council meetings, she added.

The Village will create a YouTube channel and be ready to livestream the next Council meeting on April 8th, Yanciw said.

While Peters has become a fixture at Council meetings – so much so that he has had people come to him for information about Council’s goings-on – it is time for VCTV to let Village staff handle video recordings from now on, he said. He looks forward to going hiking after work now that his Tuesday evenings are freed up.

He added, “It’s been my honour to do this for the community, for providing this coverage for all this time. It’s a responsibility I’ve never taken lightly.”

Archives of Council meetings can be found on the Valemount Community TV YouTube channel.