Palos Park upgrading meeting broadcasts — will soon go to live streaming

By Jeff Vorva 

Coming soon to a TV, computer or phone near you will be live streaming of Palos Park village council meetings.

The council unanimously voted Monday to update its audio, video monitoring and streaming equipment in the Council Room of the Kaptur Administrative Center. Sound Incorporated out of Naperville will be doing the work on spiffing up the broadcasts and it should be up and running in a few months.

“The equipment in this room is over 20 years old and some of it was purchased used at the time,” Village Manager Rick Boehm said. “Parts have stopped working and have become obsolete over the years. The village has received complaints about the sound and the video and lack of ability to livestream our meetings.

“The clarity of audio and visual equipment is vital in communicating our information.”

After the meeting, Boehm said the technology will be a huge improvement.

“This will be light years ahead of what we have now,” Boehm said. “I don’t think we have tubes back there [in the control room], but it’s pretty close.”

There was a time when meetings were broadcast live on the community’s cable channel but that stopped shortly before the pandemic hit in 2020.

“The equipment we were using failed,” Kathie Fitzgibbons, the village’s administrative analyst, said. “We were using a DVR then that we had to keep getting off of eBay and Craigslist because it was an older model that was compatible with all of our equipment. When that stopped working, we had to stop going live.”

The setup is currently an iPad recording the meetings and being streamed on YouTube or the village’s website thereafter.

The price tag for the upgrades is $38,460 with $30,000 coming out of the 2022 budget and the rest coming out of the 2023 budget.

The village has three cameras that are less than four years old, Fitzgibbons said, so they will be brought back into action.

They will, however, not be able to be broadcast in hi-definition. That was OK with some of the council members.

“Thank you for not doing high definition,” Commissioner Nicole Milovich-Walters said. “I would have had to put on a lot more makeup.”

“Me, too,” joked commissioner Dan Polk.