City weighs recording advisory boards and commissions; costs and ADA‑compliance obligations cited

City staff described the current recording and streaming workflow for City of Ellensburg council meetings and said advisory boards and commissions are not routinely recorded except for public hearings.

Nicole Klaus said IT creates the council Zoom webinar, which streams to YouTube with automatic captions available but imperfect. ECTV records meetings; the CivicClerk agenda system pulls council meeting videos from the ECTV stream, but CivicClerk does not support captions. Klaus said advisory board and commission meetings are set up individually by 13 different staff members and typically are not recorded unless the meeting is a public hearing.

Staff warned council members that recording additional meetings would add storage, staff time, captioning and archival costs. Klaus said YouTube’s automatic captions are not perfect and may not meet the new accessibility standard that agencies will need to satisfy. She said additional staff time would be required to review and correct transcripts and to develop audio descriptions to explain what is shown on screen for visually impaired viewers.

Klaus noted that CivicClerk stores videos as long as the city maintains an active subscription but cautioned that if the city later moves to a different agenda system it would need to export and internally store the video files. She said the city’s current social‑media archiving service can cover unlimited accounts for social media archiving under the present contract, but a different storage solution would be needed for city‑owned video archives.

Council members expressed strong community interest in making more meetings available online. One councilmember said the city should explore the policy and budget implications and asked staff to provide estimates of hours and dollars required to expand recordings. Another councilmember said staff should survey current commission members to assess whether recording meetings would affect volunteer willingness to serve.

Why this matters: recording additional public meetings increases transparency but also creates recurring costs for storage, captioning, accessibility remediation and public‑records management. Court challenges or ADA claims could arise if recordings and their captions/descriptions do not meet accessibility standards.

What happens next: staff will return with cost and staffing estimates for recording advisory boards and commissions, options for where videos would be stored, and recommendations about how to meet captioning and audio‑description requirements if the council chooses to expand recordings.