Amityville considers filming meetings in place of Facebook group

Amityville is deciding whether to begin broadcasting its trustee meetings, but the decision could come down to whether the village gets the state aid the governor has proposed cutting.

Members of the Facebook community group Amityville Village Watch Dog have been using a tablet to livestream most meetings of the trustee board for the past year and posting them on their page. The recordings have garnered 250 to 1,700 views for meetings that typically only a handful of residents attend.

Since September resident Donelle Cronin has told Mayor Dennis Siry that donations for the filming were running out and has asked the village to take over. Siry has said he would look into ways to broadcast the meetings. 

Siry said at Monday's trustee meeting that he had consulted with the Suffolk County Village Officials Association and found that three of the county's 32 villages livestream meetings. Siry said he talked  to one clerk of a village where livestreaming had been tried, and was told it had been “disastrous” because some residents used the live feed to grandstand and "do some bad things on camera."

Other villages, such as Freeport, record meetings which are then available for viewing later, either on television or a website. Siry said he was open to the latter and had consulted with one company that quoted a cost of several thousand dollars to set it up and that the village would then have to find someone to do the filming.

“We’re trying to find the cheapest way to do it if we’re going to do it,” he said.

But Siry noted the village is in jeopardy of losing nearly $65,000 in state Aid and Incentives for Municipalities funds from Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo's proposed budget, which would disqualify most Long Island municipalities from the program because the aid covered less than 2 percent of expenditures in 2017. Cuomo's administration has said such communities didn't need the aid.

“If that gets cut, this will definitely be put on the back burner,” the mayor said.

Trustee Nick LaLota said the Facebook group pays about $50 to livestream each meeting, a cost of $1,200 for the year. “I hope money isn’t the obstacle preventing us from doing this,” he said.

Siry said the village is “not going to just film it live and have it on Facebook. That’s not going to happen.”

Officials in Greenport and East Hampton villages, which have been livestreaming trustee, planning and zoning board meetings for several years, said they’ve had no problems with the set up.

“Most people have been well-behaved,” said Greenport Mayor George Hubbard Jr. The village pays about $1,000 a month to an outside contractor for the livestreaming, which is placed on the village’s website.

East Hampton Administrator Becky Molinaro Hansen said they are paying Local TV, Inc $70,000 this year to film three boards, putting the livestream on the Local TV station and website. She said they use a delay to avoid bad behavior being broadcast, but haven’t had any issues. “A lot of people are watching,” she said.

By Denise M. Bonilla

denise.bonilla@newsday.comdenisebonilla

Denise Bonilla has worked at Newsday since 2003 and covers the Town of Babylon, including the villages of Lindenhurst and Amityville.