Howard County begins livestreaming meetings

Tyler Juranovich, Kokomo Tribune, Ind.
·2 min read

Dec. 8—Missed a Howard County government meeting you planned on attending? Or simply want to see what the Howard County Commissioners or Howard County Council are doing but don't want to actually attend the meeting?

Now you can.

Howard County has begun livestreaming some government meetings, with Monday's commissioners meeting being the first to be livestreamed via the county's newly created YouTube channel, Howard County Government, Indiana.

County government meetings are all recorded via an audio recorder for official record purposes and to aid in the creation of each meeting's minutes, but they have not, at least in recent history, been video recorded except for a handful of times in 2020 during the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic when meetings and press conferences were livestreamed to the county's Facebook page.

The ceiling of the Richard H. Miller Hearing Room on the third floor of the Howard County Administration Center, 220 N. Main St., is now fitted with one camera that faces the chamber bench. The goal is to eventually install a camera near the bench facing the public and podium and have a picture-in-picture livestream.

Jeremy Stevens, the county's information systems director, said the livestreaming of meetings is still in its infancy as the IT department is getting acclimated with the technology and the best way to utilize it.

"Right now we're just putting the polish on it," Stevens said.

At the very least, commissioner and County Council meetings will be livestreamed, though any meeting held in room 338 could be livestreamed if the board desires.

Currently, the county's website links to the YouTube page, though Stevens said the end goal is to natively host the livestreams on the county website and post them on the county's YouTube and Facebook pages so the county is not completely reliant on one single platform.

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Tyler Juranovich can be reached at 765-454-8577, by email at tyler.juranovich@kokomotribune.com or on Twitter at @tylerjuranovich.