LYNN — A perfect storm of technical difficulties prevented Tuesday’s City Council meeting from being broadcast live to the public on Lynn Community Television or through its website and Facebook page.
The public was not provided access to the meeting until after it had concluded. A recording of the broadcast was published on the LCTV website at approximately 9:10 p.m. Tuesday and was not posted to its Facebook page until past 11:30 a.m. the next day.
According to a representative from LCTV, the cable station’s new feed and its older backup system, which encodes the meetings, both mysteriously failed, leaving its employees reeling and searching for potential improvements to their system.
“We are extremely frustrated by the situation and have already sent a strongly worded email to the vendor who installed the equipment for us in City Hall,” said LCTV Executive Director Seth Albaum. “What happened Tuesday was unacceptable.”
People attempting to watch the City Council meeting on Tuesday were instead shown a Planning Board meeting from a past week.
The situation was announced at the council meeting, which proceeded as planned.
City Attorney James Lamanna said the situation did not violate the public meeting law since there was no business that required a public hearing on the council agenda.
“The meeting can proceed. We are in compliance with the open meeting law. As long as it is rebroadcast fairly quickly — it is lawful,” said Lamanna upon announcement of the difficulties.
At the start of the pandemic, Gov. Charlie Baker passed an executive order that relieved public bodies from the requirement in the Open Meeting Law that meetings be conducted in an open and accessible public place, on the condition that the sessions instead provide “adequate, alternative” means of public access to the deliberations in real time.
However, the order provides for some leeway, as it adds that, if “for reasons of economic hardship and despite best efforts” the meeting cannot be broadcast virtually in real time, public bodies may instead post a recording of the proceedings “as soon as practicable.”
“It’s never happened here,” said City Council President Darren Cyr. “I know that right off the bat you have conspiracy theories on Facebook. Believe me, it was a simple case of them losing the signal.”
The cause of the failure still remains unclear, Albaum said.
“All we can say definitively is that both the primary and backup methods failed,” he said.
LCTV announced its intentions to invest in an additional backup system to prevent issues like what occurred Tuesday evening from happening in the future.
“We are fast-tracking quotes on a third backup system should both systems happen to fail again,” said Albaum. “We’re probably looking at $1,500 to $2,000, but it will be worth it in the rare chance both encoders go down again.”
He also said the station is considering the introduction of a fourth backup method that would involve using a cell data plan and a device called a Comrex.
According to Albaum, the system is back up and was able to successfully broadcast a Planning Board meeting on Thursday afternoon.
