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Lake Cowichan going online with council meetings

For some, it’ll be the perfect background noise for deep sleep induction, for others though, Lake Cowichan town council’s move to begin offering online live-streaming of their council meetings will offer a chance to continue, or renew, engagement with the town’s leaders.
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North Cowichan council (pictured) held it’s first virtual council meeting back in April. Lake Cowichan council is following suit and will be posting their meetings on YouTube as well. (Screenshot)

For some, it’ll be the perfect background noise for deep sleep induction, for others though, Lake Cowichan town council’s move to begin offering online live-streaming of their council meetings will offer a chance to continue, or renew, engagement with the town’s leaders.

“We’re probably two to four weeks away from perfecting that,” Mayor Bob Day confirmed last week.

Getting those meetings online was one of his election platform issues so he’s excited to check that box off so early into his term.

“We recorded on Zoom this week and uploaded to YouTube the next day and it took staff time just to learn that procedure and we’re definitely going live and I expect to be there by Dec. 8 but if it doesn’t happen, we’ll have a very good reason.”

Day said the town has reached out to Ladysmith for help in setting their system up.

“We want to make it open and have access to question period as well and there is a process that they use for that and we’d probably like to follow along with that same protocol,” he said.

While Lake Cowichan is dragging a bit behind neighbouring municipalities in getting council meetings online, it would have happened eventually, Day said, but not likely until 2022 when the town hall renovation was done, had it not been for the COVID-19 pandemic.

“The COVID definitely pushed it along for sure,” Day said.



sarah.simpson@cowichanvalleycitizen.com

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Sarah Simpson

About the Author: Sarah Simpson

I started my time with Black Press Media as an intern, before joining the Citizen in the summer of 2004.
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