Years after becoming aware of shortcomings in their IT department, the Urbana, Illinois City Council still has not taken any measureable action to fix problems with their meeting broadcasts and recordings.

Excuses for audio and video problems started with Covid when the City switched over to online meetings.  However, while the rest of the country quickly upped their streaming game, Urbana continued to have problems.

Even now, after having switched back to in-person meetings, City Council broadcasts are ridden with poor audio quality, video glitches, and sometimes failures to broadcast anything at all.  The current set of problems started about a year ago, but Urbana IT Director Sanford Hess is no closer to implementing any solutions.

On February 20^th, 2023, Hess sent a memorandum to the Mayor and City Council, listing a myriad of excuses for the constant problems but no solutions.  “There is no clear answer as to why there were issues”, said Hess.  This isn’t the first time that Hess has sent such a memo to the Council about broadcast issues.

The problems do not only affect live meeting broadcasts.  Urbana residents have also complained about not being able to watch past meeting recordings posted on the City’s website.  At time of writing this article, Check CU attempted to play video from a City Council meeting in January but the video would not stream more than a few staggered frames and was not watchable.

In a time when most high school students could readily setup a perfectly functional live a/v stream with a cell phone, IT Director Hess’s excuses fall far short of expectations.

Give Mayor Diane Marlin’s past attempts to unlawfully inhibit public attendance, public input, and recording of public meetings, a likely explanation for the ongoing failures is that the Mayor simply prefers less public exposure and has no interest on improving access for Urbana residents.

Urbana Officials Prohibit Recording of Off-Site City Council Meeting