News
Streaming New York: Governor Spitzer Orders Webcasts of Public Meetings
By Geoff Daily
Feb 13, 2007, 02:19

On January 1st, his first day as governor, New York’s Eliot Spitzer issued an executive order promoting webcasts of state public meetings.

“In the order, it says that public businesses should be performed in an open, public manner,” says Brad Maione, Spitzer’s spokesperson. “Governor Spitzer has stressed since the beginning of the administration that transparency and public accountability are very important, and this dovetails nicely with that.”

The order is an extension of New York’s Open Meetings Law, enacted in the mid-1970s to ensure public access to public meetings. The law calls for public business to “be performed in an open and public manner” and says citizens should be “able to observe the performance of public officials and attend and listen to the deliberations and decisions that go into the making of public policy.”

Governor Spitzer’s order extends the Open Meetings Law through the use of broadband. In it, he spells out a plan for implementing this technology across all state agencies. By March 1 of this year, every agency and public authority must submit to the Secretary to the Governor a plan that identifies all meetings that are subject to the Open Meetings Law and specifies a timetable for ensuring all such meetings are broadcast on the Internet.  By July 1, the meetings must actually be broadcast on the Internet.

“This is a big step in New York,” says Maione. “We’re going to work with the agencies to identify the meetings and also the timetable and how we’re going to carry it out. It’s going to take some time to get it together, but once it does it’ll be good for the public.”

For companies in the business of webcasting, the order is a vindication of their efforts.  “It’s a great thing to see,” says Tom Spengler, CEO of Granicus. “It’s the first time that I’ve seen nationwide where the executive office said, ‘Hey, we’re going to make it a priority to make all of our meetings available to the public through streaming audio and video.’ This is what we’ve been pushing for for years, so it’s really nice to see the leadership at the state level make this big a step forward.”

Spengler says that legislation requiring Internet broadcasts of public meetings has been proposed in several other states but has not succeeded. “In California, probably about two years ago, there was a bill but it never got out of committee,” he adds. Granicus already provides the technology for more than 100 local governments in California to stream their public meetings via Internet, and Spengler anticipates statewide legislation to be enacted in the next few years.

While Spitzer’s order is limited to state agencies, it may have a trickle-down effect to New York’s city and county governments, spurring them to adopt streaming technologies. And it also holds the promise of influencing governments beyond the state’s borders. “As an attorney general, Eliot did a lot of things that provided resources and expertise to other states, so I’m sure that states will take a look at this and consider it for their own communities,” says Maione.