By Pepper Fisher
PORT ANGELES – One of things exposed in the years since the Covid pandemic hit was the inadequacy of the audio/visual equipment used by some of our public agencies during those seemingly endless months of remote public meetings.
In the case of the Board of County Commissioner’s conference room, that’s about to change. Clallam County’s Information Technology Director Mark Doten says they’ll be closing that meeting room down for a week in February for a major upgrade.
“You know, I’ve been here with the County two years, taking over the Technology Director role, and that’s the biggest thing that we’re focusing on, my team here, is improving the technology stack, modernizing it, so that we can give citizens a richer experience and a better way to interact with county government here.”
Doten says his office has been working on this for months, but supply chain issues postponed the project until now. He says upgrades will include 2 80-inch digital displays on the walls of the room, which will accommodate 2 meetings at once when the room is divided into 2 rooms.
They’re also installing omni-directional microphones on the ceiling, control display tablets for the clerk and commissioners to be able to control audio/visual elements remotely, including point/tilt/zoom cameras on the ceiling that can focus in on whoever is speaking.
“This kind of sprang out of when Covid-19 first hit, and we ended up doing a lot more virtual-only meetings. A lot of people complained about sound quality, video quality, the distance of the cameras from the audience. And we’ve been working on this upgrade for actually about 15 months now. And it’s a wholesale replacement of technology in that room, so that we can get the best-of-breed for both video and audio out of each and every commissioner’s meeting that we hold in the future.”
The money to pay for the new upgrades is courtesy of the large tranche of federal ARPA funds the County got during the pandemic, some of which can be earmarked for these projects because of the increased need for remote meetings going forward.