Grosse Pointe Shores purchases new camera to record meetings

GROSSE POINTE SHORES — Grosse Pointe Shores residents and others who’ve been missing not being able to watch City Council meetings remotely will soon be able to do so again.

Roughly a year after the city’s last camera system for recording meetings stopped working, the Shores has gotten a new system that will once again enable the city to film council proceedings. Unlike previous replacement camera systems priced by the city, which were about $40,000, City Manager Stephen Poloni said this one — from Pointe Alarm — is only about $3,900. Pointe Alarm was slated to install the system in December, and Poloni said he hoped they would be able to record the council’s next regular meeting, which at press time was scheduled for 7 p.m. Jan. 17. The high price tag city leaders initially got from other vendors is what kept them from replacing the old system immediately.

Poloni said the Pointe Alarm system is very similar to the one Pointe Alarm recently installed in council chambers for Grosse Pointe Park City Council meetings.

“It’s not a large system,” Public Works Director Mike Way said. “It’s just one camera.”

The last system also used a single, stationary camera to record the meetings.

Poloni said the new system won’t require microphones, because it will be sensitive enough to pick up the voices of speakers without them.

The quality of the old system could be unpredictable, given its age. Poloni said viewers should notice a marked difference with the new camera.

“It’ll be better than what we had previously — much better — the sound, the quality,” Poloni told the Shores City Council during a meeting Dec. 13.

They won’t have different camera angles, but they didn’t have that before, either.

The meetings won’t be livestreamed, but Poloni said they will be available online through YouTube via the city’s website. Meetings will be uploaded after they take place, although it wasn’t known at press time how quickly they’d be available to view online. To watch a meeting or for more information, visit www.gpshoresmi.gov.