How can Jersey shore towns provide greater municipal transparency for their residents and business operators?
The easiest, most impactful thing to do… turn on the camera. Let taxpayers participate in city government by streaming public city meetings to YouTube.
For free.
Atlantic City is live streaming their meetings. So is Ventnor and Atlantic County. Even glitch-prone Brigantine has great live video when greenhead shenanigans are not at play.
Margate and Longport still block live ZOOM video feed.
Hartzell: Yes. Once I lost the election (for Mayor of OC) they stopped the live video stream.
Hartzell: the minute I lost the election and the new regime came in, OC meetings on Zoom stopped.
Hartzell was a guest on the WOND Prime Time Dan Klein show.
WOND Radio’s Dan Klein: Can’t understand why they wouldn’t want to stream their public meetings. Cost and tech are no longer a concern.
Next step, make sure people can find the council meeting videos on YouTube.
In Ocean City, someone decided to ‘unlist’ or effectively ‘hide’ the videos from being searched and found.
Unlisted Ocean City council meeting videos. Why hide them? Why have a partially hidden YouTube channel?
The Internet can be a great way to increase civic engagement. But some it seems, are trying to decrease civic engagement.
Out of site, out of mind.
They don’t want to let you to know how the sausage is made.
Support ‘FIT’, Fairness in Taxes.
FIT is the civic watchdog for all Ocean City taxpayers.
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