Approximately a year after originally requested, the Las Virgenes Municipal Water District voted tonight to start video taping all board meetings and making them available on the web for the public to see. LVMWD is the last local public organization to make video recordings of regular meetings available (Westlake Village started seven years ago, and Las Virgenes Unified School District began eight years ago). [Ed. Note: City of Westlake Village began video recording and broadcasting on TV in the mid-1990’s. While the City has archives of those meetings, videos were not available on the web until 2006.]
Over the past year, the public and media have requested video recordings on the basis of transparency, but LVMWD staff only presented the board with extraordinarily expensive solutions. Board Members Barry Steinhardt and Len Polan have been pushing staff for implementable solutions. And, tonight, new General Manager David Pedersen presented the board with four options — from least to most cost (and least to most capabilities).
Specifically, LVMWD has opted to hire a third-party to produce video recordings and deliver the video to LVMWD to post on the LVMWD web site. The meetings will be video recorded starting with the next meeting on March 26th.
