Monday, April 16, 2012
Chicago Sun-Times
by LISA DONOVAN

Starting Tuesday, Cook County Board meetings — typically held on weekdays and, as a result, tough for many people to attend — will be live-streamed on the Internet atcookcountyil.gov/secretarytotheboard.

“The board members will be live — it’s like ‘Saturday Night Live’ sometimes,” Commissioner John Daley said Monday, announcing the move with Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle. “We won’t have a host each week, but the president is always host.”

Full board meetings and committee meetings will be streamed, and so will meetings of the Cook County forest preserve board. County commissioners double as board members for the forest preserves.

Chicago City Council meetings have been streamed over the Internet since 2007.

Currently, county board meetings and forest preserve meetings are taped for later broadcast on Comcast cable’s Channel 900. Preckwinkle said the move to live-streaming will eliminate the $100,000-a-year cost of camera rental to tape meetings, though there was a one-time $200,000 cost to install cameras and equipment to facilitate live streaming, and the county will pay $40,000 a year for a vendor to handle the live-streaming and to archive the meetings.