Beaufort County Commissioners Discuss the Strategy of the Continuation of Filming Meetings | Eastern North Carolina Now

This post begins a process of Beaufort County government explained through the segmented videos, and some explanation. When reading this post, please turn your audio on with your volume up to a comfortable level.

    The Beaufort County Commissioners met December 3, 2018 to discuss a myriad of issues, but not least of which was the approval of a 110,000.00 allowance of already budgeted public money to significantly change the construct of filming those general meetings, and to what degree we provide a quality product to our citizens.

    At the center of this story of completely renegotiating the filming of commissioners' meetings paradigm is the renovated Beaufort County government administration building on the corner of West Second Street and Union Ave. in Washington, otherwise known to a growing number of citizens as the "Meeting Palace". Part of these renovations is the elaborately planned audio /visual element of meeting space for county functions, especially as the space where the county commissioners govern as by general meetings, and other lesser meetings.

    The story begins with the county buying a building from a bank that moved to a different location, spending considerable money to reconfigure the building. Then on Monday night, December 3rd, approval was needed from the county commissioners to spend an additional 110,000.00 to finish the planned audio /visual component of the renovation. This being my first night back on the county commission, I, Stan Deatherage, your humble county commissioner, needed some answers as to what comprised this large expenditure.

    The answers to my questions created even more question by me, and then all of the other commissioners subsequently had more thoughtful questions, or just something to say. Nothing was settled this night, and probably will not be settled until we have quite a bit more discussion if we are to do what is truly right by the citizens of Beaufort County.

    At the nexus of this discussion, which can be found on the video below, is that the 110,000.00 allowance is for more elaborate equipment which may help, in part, to create a record of our meetings, but nothing substantial enough to come close to the product that we now have to provide our citizens at a cost of about 10,000.00 per year.



    Stay tune to BCN, for this is a core issue - the distribution of transparency while keeping our citizenry informed.