Technician forgot to turn on VCR to make official copy of Oct. 7 meeting
LEWISTON – A video taped record of the City Council’s Oct. 7 meeting was never made, according to City Clerk Kathy Montejo.
Montejo said Sandra Prince, the computer operations technician charged with televising and taping the meeting last week, neglected to record it. Prince discovered the mistake immediately after the meeting.
“The mayor’s gavel went down and she went to push the stop button,” Montejo said. “That’s when she discovered that she’d forgotten to put the tape in at first. It was a mistake, pure and simple.”
It’s the second time that particular mistake has happened since the city began recording and broadcasting the meetings on Great Falls TV. Technicians have to make sure the cameras and sound systems are working and that the show is appearing on the local cable channel.
“They have so many things to juggle, and they can forget to push the record button,” Montejo said. “That’s what happened this one time, and she feels rotten about it.”
Besides the official meeting minutes Montejo takes by hand, the video recording is the only official transcript the city keeps. The city does not keep an audio recording of each meeting.
A similar thing happened in Auburn last month. A tape of a Sept. 8 Auburn City Council meeting featuring councilors criticizing each other turned up blank a week later. Auburn City Clerk Mary Lou Magno said she did not know what happened to the audio tape.
The Oct. 7 Lewiston meeting featured verbal sparring between councilors and Bob Stone, who leads a Maine political action committee promoting Question 1C on this November’s ballot.
Stone urged councilors to agree to cut property taxes by 15 percent next year or repudiate the Maine Municipal Association, backers of the competing Question 1A.
The meeting ended with councilors Roger Philippon and Lillian O’Brien disagreeing with Stone. Stone said a supporter requested a copy of the meeting tape, only to discover that no tape existed.
“There were some interesting statements the councilors made that we felt might be useful in future commercials on this issue,” Stone said. “We felt that some statements showed just how arrogant some of our elected officials really are, and those were statements we wanted saved for posterity.”
Montejo said technicians will now push the record button first, before the meeting begins.
“We know that this is going to create 10 or 15 minutes of dead air at the beginning of every tape,” Montejo said. “But that’s what we’re going to have to do to prevent this kind of thing from happening again.”
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