|
School board's
TV debut delayed
Projected price
quadruples; start date moved to January
Staff Writer
Published
October 01, 2008
By ELISABETH HULETTE
A slow start to the bidding
process has stalled the debut of county school board broadcasts.
Meanwhile, the project's price
tag quadrupled after school officials found the board room's aging
electrical system would have to be rewired.
This month the board was supposed
to have begun televising its meetings on local cable, but now that start
date has been pushed back to January. The delay occurred when no companies
stepped up when the project was put out for bid in May, officials said.
"We were supposed to have
all this done over the summer," said Don Cramer, supervisor of
design and print services for the school system. "It was a long process
that we were kind of frustrated with."
The Board of Education approved
the project in October 2007 as a way to improve communication with the
public. Officials plan to broadcast the meetings live over the school
system's cable channel: 96 on Comcast and Broadstripe;
and channel 36 on Verizon.
When school officials proposed
the plan a year ago they projected that outfitting the board room with
cameras and lighting would cost $100,000; now they've pegged it at more
than $444,000.
School officials based their
original estimate of $100,000 on the cost of outfit the County Council's
chamber for broadcasting about nine years ago. County officials said they
had estimated about $250,000.
Since then officials have
discovered the board room in the school system office on Riva Road
doesn't have the electrical capacity for broadcasting, said Alex Szachnowicz, chief operating officer for county
schools.
"One huge deviation that was
unaccounted for early on was they didn't know they had to put in subpanels and run conduit back to the electrical
room," he said.
The project is being funded with
"public education in government" fees that cable companies pay
to the county under their contract with the federal government.
The county gets about $1.6
million each year in so-called "PEG" fees and uses them for
public information and government infrastructure, such as a fiber-optic
network that runs Internet access to schools, said John Lyons, who
administers the broadcasting for the county.
Because the money is coming from
those fees and not from taxes, the school board won't have to ask the
county to officially appropriate the new $444,640 estimate, said Kurt Svendsen, assistant budget officer for the county.
No one bid on the project the
first time it was put out in May, but the second time, in July, Roanoke,
Va.-based Lee Hartman and Sons made a bid, and Mr. Cramer predicted
meetings could be televised by January.
But even then the broadcast
system will be antiquated compared to more progressive districts in other
parts of the country, according to a nationally recognized expert in
public access to government information.
"Basically (county schools)
have a 1970 model of government access," said Severna Park resident
Jim Snider, president of iSolon.org, a nonprofit information technology
think-tank. "They're just broadcasting a stream of information over
the cable systems ... There's no excuse for not making it available
online."
Posting video online has become
accepted as a better way to give the public access to government meetings,
Mr. Snider said. Public libraries have free Internet but not cable, and
if the videos are indexed, viewers can easily find what they need.
And the state's open meetings law
doesn't cover video recording, Mr. Snider said.
Mr. Cramer said his office wants
to put videos of school board meetings online eventually, but it's a
question of funding. Money also was the reason Anne Arundel is the last
of several surrounding districts to televise its meetings, he said.
"We want to push toward that
(posting online), but we're not there yet," Mr. Cramer said.
"Baby steps."
|
