When it comes to the question of whether live images and sounds from city and municipal council meetings are a good thing, sooner or later you end up with an audio document captured by a microphone in the Ingolstadt city council. “Mei, it’s a bunch of fools,” grumbled one of the mayor’s deputies in March 2018. The delicate thing: He was ?? because he was sitting right next to the OB? almost on the air. The mayor later denied that the city council had been referred to by the “idiot”. But: The quote made the rounds and has been in the room ever since when it comes to the subject of livestreams from town halls? as a deterrent example: this is how it can work when city councils discover the Internet for themselves.
This is a bad example for Erich Jakubczyk. With his party, the ÖDP district association Kitzingen, he has just started a new attempt to place the topic in the city council. A first attempt by the ÖDP failed in 2013 due to resistance from a narrow majority. Another citizen application is now on the table, supported by 266 supporters who signed the project. According to the municipal code, the city council must decide on the application within three months ?? and could be one of the pioneers. Because so far there has only been a live stream in Lower Franconia from the Aschaffenburg city council. In April, an application by the Greens failed in Würzburg.
Kitzinger OB sees a great opportunity to increase the range
For the mayor of Kitzingen, Stefan Güntner (CSU), it is already clear how he will decide. On the list of the ÖDP he signed for the application, and also in his parliamentary group, the largest of the city council, he wants to get approval for the project. “This is a huge opportunity to significantly increase our reach,” says Güntner in an interview with this editorial team.
While at best a dozen listeners have so far followed the sessions, live broadcasts on the Internet could quickly increase the number to a few hundred. The promise made by politicians during the election campaign to ensure more openness and closeness to the citizens? where could it be redeemed better than with such a project?
The ÖDP application also ties in with this. “Livestream ensures more transparency of work and a better range of information,” it says there. A modern city needs modern means of communication. And: “Politicians must fight to regain trust that has been lost.”
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These are all understandable reasons for Güntner too. Yet he can’t be sure that the matter will go through in the city council. Although his challenger Manfred Paul (SPD), who lost in March, also signed for the application, there are 30 men and women on the city council, and everyone can insist on their personal rights and object to being shown in the picture.
The success of the project stands and falls with the acceptance of all those involved. The audience in a session, who usually sit at the edge or at the back, could most likely be faded out during a transmission.
It becomes much more complicated with the councils. If a city council that has objected to a recording should speak up, the transmission would have to be interrupted and could only be continued when it has finished its presentation. A session would quickly turn into incoherent snippets of images and sound. “If you can see a black screen for ten minutes, it is not particularly user-friendly,” explains Herbert Müller, who has dealt intensively with the project in the Kitzingen city administration. With every blackout, the risk that the visitor will leave the transmission increases.
The experiences in Pfaffenhofen have been very positive
Before making a decision, Güntner is therefore promoting a test run in which every city council? in the literal sense ?? can get a picture of the matter. Perhaps, he hopes, this will take away the fear of some skeptics.
In Pfaffenhofen an der Ilm in Upper Bavaria ?? with 26,000 inhabitants comparable in size to Kitzingen ?? one is long past the trial run. Not only the meetings of the city council and its associated committees, but also citizens’ assemblies since 2012 have been fed into the global network there ?? with consistently positive experiences, as press spokesman Marzellus Weinmann says. The live stream, recently even in high-resolution HD format, is a “success story” and is followed by an average of 700 citizens. Since the community has also been using Facebook as an information medium for about two years, the broadcasts have added between 800 and 1200 users.
If you click into the meetings, you can see the full length of the meeting room. Speakers make a big contribution to their statements. According to Weinmann, there were only discussions when it came to archiving; the city council set a limit so that only the last four meetings are available. Practical for the user: he can later call up each of the points dealt with individually, so he does not have to click through hours of sessions. The costs are manageable. In Pfaffenhofen, an external service provider is responsible for the transmission and processing, 1,000 to 1,200 euros are reportedly incurred depending on the meeting. In addition, there are 10,000 to 15,000 euros for a stationary microphone system in the hall.
Media professional Matthias Bielek is also for the live stream
Not only in Kitzingen the topic gained momentum with the assumption of office of the new mayor. In Dettelbach, too, with 7200 inhabitants and ten districts, the newly elected mayor Matthias Bielek (Free Voters) is concerned with the question of how it will be possible to better reach citizens in the future. During the election campaign, Bielek, an experienced media professional as a television reporter and radio presenter, also called for more transparency to attract trust. Now, however, he does not want to take the newly elected city council by surprise, but rather “tackle the subject with kid gloves”, which he knows is controversial. If there is too much contradiction, he will let go of the matter for the time being. “Otherwise we would pillory the councilors who reject live images,” says Bielek.
When the topic hit the Iphöfer City Council in 2013 ?? initiated by a single citizen ??, it was said that the time was not yet ripe. How is the matter today? “It’s still not an issue,” says Mayor Dieter Lenzer (Free Voters), who also took office in May. If citizens are interested in local politics, they are invited to come to the meetings; only very few take up the offer.
For Lenzer, however, it is not an option to increase the reach by broadcasting the meetings live. “Once an image is in the world, it stays there,” he says. He also cares about the authenticity of the images. With today’s technology, recordings can easily be edited, falsified and taken out of context. He watches it on television, for example in the satire format “heute-show”, explains Lenzer. “The door would be wide open to manipulation.”
Würzburg and Schweinfurt recently rejected applications
For this reason, too, the Schweinfurt district assembly has just rejected an application from the AfD. The recordings could subsequently be edited in such a way that they distorted the overall picture of the session. There are also high legal hurdles. Gerolzhofen’s mayor Thorsten Wozniak (CSU) referred to data protection and personal rights. The city of Würzburg argued similarly in its recommendation to the city council in the spring.
In Karlstadt (Lkr. Main-Spessart), Mayor Michael Hombach (CSU) says after six months in office: “Assuming 24 councilors agreed to a broadcast and three would be against, then you would have to interrupt the live stream every time as soon as one who answers three. It would be like having a phone call and 20 seconds are missing. ” Contributions to the discussion would be taken out of context.
Hombach says he has no reservations about the topic, but so far there have not been any audible signals in this direction, nor is the interest in the meetings particularly high. “If a new fire station is built, ten firefighters like to come to the meeting. When it comes to a green plan, things look different.”
In Bad Neustadt (district of Rhön-Grabfeld) too, Christoph Neubauer, manager of the town hall, found that no one had yet approached the city with the request for live broadcasts. Markus Geissler from the local authority in the district administration adds: “So far we have not had any inquiries from the municipalities on the subject.”
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