The borough is continuing its research on whether the Borough Council will switch from a Zoom’s panelist webinar format to a regular meeting format showing all participants.
Additional recommendations will be researched and brought back before council for discussion, according to Borough Administrator Gian-Paolo Caminiti.
A request from a Pennington resident prompted the borough council and staff to review methods to potentially allow for the public to view who else from the public is attending the monthly council Zoom meetings even if they are not actively participating.
Pennington reached out to surrounding municipalities to see how they were conducting their own virtual and Zoom meetings and what their best practices have been.
“We found that most are using a hybrid [model],” Caminiti said in a Borough Council work session on Sept. 30. “In person plus virtual, which shows all of the login participants, but they only receive a link following registration.
“Meaning that if you are not at the meeting in person you have to register prior to the meeting date and you get the link so that the data captures who is approved for participation on the hybrid model.”
Caminiti explained the hybrid model comes with an additional layer of administrative work and some municipalities have had to resort to hiring additional staff.
“I don’t know whether it is part-time or full-time staff, but I’m going to presume part-time staff to address that additional administrative workload,” he said. “We are not using the hybrid model. We are not seriously considering having in person meetings again for a very simple reason, because we don’t have the recording equipment in council chambers that we would need to do that.”
Proposals to retrofit council chambers with recording equipment that Pennington has received to date would cost the borough about $20,000 or more.
“We also thought about the request from the single residents to receive the information about passive meeting participants as opposed to what we are hearing from other residents about wanting to maintain their anonymity because of concern about being approached between meetings or out on the street or in public somewhere about meetings contents,” Caminiti said.
“We also asked Walter Bliss [borough attorney] to look into some of the details of the Open Public Meetings Act (OPRA). It is very clear that we are not sacrificing transparency as a municipality in anyway shape or form or compromising the intent or letter of OPRA that requires us to document scrupulously borough actions and activities that involve residents in a way. Passive participants do not fall under that obligation.”
Caminiti noted that they examined these four elements and decided that there was not a big advantage for the council to change the format of the existing Zoom meetings.
Pennington Borough currently utilizes a webinar panelist Zoom format where residents and public attend the Borough Council meeting. If they wish to speak in public comment or in a public hearing, they must click the raised hand feature to indicate they wish to speak.
Borough Clerk Betty Sterling promotes the attendee to become a panelist where they are then able to speak during public comment on any issue or during a specific public hearing. Attendees in this format are not able to know who else is in attendance from the public until a person speaks during those comment periods.
“We are doing [Zoom] the panelist way, [where] most viewers are passive,” Council President Catherine “Kit” Chandler said. “The problem with that is you are sitting there alone; you are literally alone listening to this not knowing who else is on it and you don’t see anybody else.
“It is very isolating to be sitting there watching this Zoom not knowing who you are watching it with. I go to Zoom meetings at Princeton all the time. There are like a 100 of us there and I can see who is there and I am muted. I can’t say a thing, but I know so and so is from [this organization] is here or Susan from electrical engineering is here, oh I need to talk to her about something…that is what we are lacking here.”
Chandler suggested that they get rid of the panelists and just have a meeting. “I am sort of willing to give it a try and for whatever reason there is unforeseen issues then we can go back to what we have now.”
Councilwoman Nadine Stern agreed, “I’m also not sure why we can’t do a meeting format where people are muted.”
At the end of the work session discussion on the topic, Caminiti added that he would continue to do research for additional recommendations and circle back to borough council for further discussion.
