The Lincoln County Commissioners approved the hiring of a consulate to begin working towards providing a public live video broadcast of county commission meetings. The motion was unanimously approved in the February 17 regular meeting to hire Absolute AV Technology for $4,867.20. In the previous meeting on February 3, the commissioners approved spending up to $7,000 to hire a consultant for live streaming.

“We’ve hired a group to help us assess what current AV (audio/visual) equipment we have right now and what we can utilize moving forward,” stated Commissioner Mel Shumway during a live interview on SVI Radio. “Keep in mind we’ve got to incorporate the streaming service in three locations. The current boardroom in the courthouse, the Afton Annex and the old District Courthouse in Kemmerer that’s moving out to the new Justice Center.”

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Commissioner Shumway said the AV consulting group will meet with the county within 60 for a walkthrough and to see what equipment they recommend and the price tag. Afterwards it will take 3-4 weeks to begin installing and incorporating the equipment to provide a public video feed of meetings.

“We don’t have a huge I.T. Department in our county,” Shumway continued. “We’ve got some really great people but they’re spread pretty thin. If we tasked them to do that everything else would be put on hold so we’ve kind of got to bring outside help in to get this done timely and efficiently.”

Currently, a live feed of county commission meetings in Kemmerer is provided at the county offices on Jefferson St. in Afton, which acts as a remote location for meetings. However, recent calls from the public and municipalities for the commissioners to also provide a public feed that is accessible anywhere, such as on YouTube, both live and archived has prompted the county to move forward with the AV consultant. In recent weeks that the county has begun adding audio recordings of commission meetings to their website.