BELMONT — Two members of the Board of Selectmen decided last night not to support a proposal from Town Administrator Jeanne Beaudin to spend an extra $2,000 to implement a plan that would allow the town to begin recording from two camera angles the board’s bi-weekly selectmen’s meetings for showing on Lakes Region Public Access television. Instead, the project will proceed with just a single camera. At the board’s meeting in the Corner Meeting House, Chairman Ron Cormier suggested spending the money to make up for a gap between what the town currently has available for the project and what Beaudin said is needed for making a “quality” recording to show later on MetroCast Cablevision Channel 26. But board members Jon Pike and Reggie Caldwell refused to support the idea, noting that March Town Meeting voters approved only $5,000 for the recording equipment and they did not want to go beyond that figure. “That’s what we (town voters) appropriated because someone stood up (at the annual meeting) and said this is what it’s going to cost,” Pike said. “It’s typical Belmont — someone stands up in the back of the room and says they’ve already researched it, they know everything about it and this is what it’s going to cost. And they said it would cost $4,000. What would have happened if we hadn’t added the other thousand?” Beaudin said that at the board’s last meeting the members asked her to go back into the budget and find the extra $2,000 needed for the project. “That’s what I did,” she told them. “I changed my mind,” Pike responded. Chairman Cormier favors the idea of having the board’s meetings shown on cable television because voters decided to make Belmont an official ballot, or SB-2, town next year. That means the traditional Town Meeting will be scraped in favor of a “Deliberative Session” — where warrant articles can be debated and altered — in February, and the final vote on the entire warrant takes place on election day in March. “I’m concerned about the issues and that nobody’s going to know what’s going on (on election day),” Cormier said. “I don’t know they will if we’re on television but at least they’ll be given the opportunity.” The chairman said that the fact that the voters had approved the $5,000 appropriation indicated that they want the meetings to be available on television. But the two other selectmen said that if that were true, the voters could add the extra $2,000 needed at the next Town Meeting in March 2009. Actually the town has about $9,000 to fund the recording project. MetroCast typically gives municipalities that are starting to record meetings for the cable television outlet a “character generator,” which allows the operator to superimpose the name and date of the meeting on the screen. The equipment, which costs about $4,000, is paid for from a fee local cable television subscribers pay to the company. But Belmont already owns a piece of equipment that serves a similar purpose so it’s eligible to receive the machine’s value in cash. In the spring, Beaudin said her research had led her to recommend that the town fathers approve a two-camera set-up: one camera would be aimed at the front of the room where the board members sit; the other would be aimed at the right side where people addressing the board sometimes speak and use materials to address their concerns. At the time, the administrator said the set-up would cost slightly more than the $9,000 that was available. She said she hoped the meetings would begin appearing on channel 26 some time early this month. After the board could not agree on the extra expenditure last night, Chairman Cormier directed Beaudin to move ahead and purchase one camera to record its meetings. She said the change — and the loss of a “switcher” to switch back and forth between two cameras’ images – meant the project could be brought in for a little less than the $9,000 available. Beaudin said she would make a call today to try to move the issue towards resolution.
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