The Kenai City Council shared a discussion about the future of zoom meetings, and whether to keep them, or terminate them.
There were many thoughts mentioned during this action item.
Vice Mayor Henry Knackstedt opened the discussion by saying in-person comments, as well as written comments are extremely valuable to him. It gives the individual the ability to be a part of the decision more effectively and makes putting them on the record much easier. He does mention that zoom participation has been lacking, and it can sometimes be “distracting” for members of the council. But that does not mean he is opposed to the usage of zoom.
“I do support continuing with Zoom or some other platform that the clerk might come up with that provides for council when we can’t be here for a contractor for example, a Commission member or something like that. But that kind of limits the public use there. But we do have YouTube which. If most of them it appears to just be watching anyway that are there and that is a very good mode to do that is through YouTube. So, I would be inclined to drop the public participation part,” said Knackstedt.
Mayor Brian Gabriel did voice a concern, wanting to make sure that everyone who used the platform had an opportunity to voice their thoughts on zoom.
Kenai Clerk Shellie Saner explained that the overall participation would be determined based on what the final decision was.
“So, there are certain aspects with planning and zoning activity where the applicant is required to be in the. So, if we were to, I wouldn’t recommend it because we’re then we are not offering the same opportunity to the public. It’s one of those, all, or nothing because we need to be fair with all our constituents and if we’re going to allow one. We could be disenfranchising another person that wanted to comment on the same thing, but they couldn’t get here,” said Saner.
Council member Phil Daniel was surprised that the numbers for online participation were so slow, but he also believes that having zoom as “another tool in the toolbox for public participation is important.”
“We should be able to offer as many opportunities as possible for people to participate if they want to. Being a body here, we are open to the public and some people may not want to make the journey. As you can see, the hot button items are the ones that people will participate in. They live here they may be snowbirds we don’t know, and I feel like it’d be a disservice of us as a council to take that opportunity away for people that may not be able to come in and give their testimony,” said Daniel.
Councilmember James Baisden mentions that the zoom meetings were started during the COVID-19 pandemic, and that the council was successful without the use of online platforms. He sees how it could be useful for remotes areas to chime into the meeting, but he hopes to see members of the community present in the meetings if they choose to participate.
“You should be in this, in this chamber right here if you want to have comments. This elected body just means more to me,” said Baisden.
Vice Mayor Knackstedt recollects how the council had to work on zoom during the pandemic, and how it gave the councilmembers an option on how to work considering the circumstances. But being online still received community interaction, just in different ways.
“We got a lot of people that would they were interested; they came here, or they sent emails, and we’d get lots of emails that would go through the clerk and to us. And I’d like to see those increase and anybody that’s traveling or whatever and I’ve done it before too. Send an e-mail to the clerk when I wasn’t on council or whatever to make sure that that got to council and they could read it and then it would become part of the packet,” said Knackstedt.
The biggest concern as of recent is zoom-bombing, where hackers will enter the zoom meeting and begin to harass members of the community.
“You know, I don’t want to see zoom bombs. I think that was totally ridiculous and I think we’re very much exposed with that scenario that, you know, package that we had,” said Mayor Gabriel.
Saner did explain that the council did upgrade either zoom subscription since the zoom bombing that took place at the Oct. 19th meeting. “Our current subscription that we have is $1999 a year. Adding webinars is an additional thousand, bringing us to $3000 a year,”
She does warn that there are some “really good hackers out there,” but that this webinar should give the council a better opportunity to prevent zoom-bombings from happening in the future.
Mayor Gabriel believes that the current opinion of the council is to allow remote participation to continue for city council meetings, as well as planning and zooming committees, but not for the board and commission meetings.
The policy will be brought forward again at a future meeting.