Livingston’s Zoning Board will move its meetings to in-person only, beginning Tuesday, September 12. After holding its public sessions online through Zoom for several years, the Zoning Board will now return to the Town Hall chambers. Conference sessions that precede the public hearings will take place inside the nearby conference room in the same building.This makes the Zoning Board the final governing entity in Livingston to return to in-person meetings. But unlike the Township Council and the Livingston Public Schools Board of Education, the Zoning Board currently has no plan to livestream its meetings. Like the Planning Board meetings, Zoning Board meetings are expected to be uploaded to the town’s YouTube page at a later date.For nearly three years, since the start of the COVID pandemic until the start of 2023, the Zoning Board had publicly shared a livestream of its meetings. That abruptly stopped at the beginning of this year, with no explanation given for the reason for doing so. The meetings were still available on Zoom, just not on the town’s Facebook or YouTube pages, where residents were able to view them after they had ended and without needing to log in to Zoom. Since then, residents needed to be “on time” for the meeting, and if they missed it, they were out of luck. Now, the Zoning Board is returning in person, but we do not know how soon after the meetings that those recordings will become available to view from home. The conference meetings will also not be part of the recordings.The Council meetings are livestreamed and are able to be viewed on the Council’s Facebook and YouTube pages. The Board of Education meets in a hybrid format, in-person and on Zoom, and continues to livestream meetings to the Livingston Public Schools Facebook page. Both the Council and Board of Education meetings may also be viewed after they are completed.Like the Zoning Board intends to be, the Planning Board is also not livestreamed. Those meetings have usually (but not always) been uploaded to the town’s YouTube page within a day of the meeting. But there is simply no good reason not to show these meetings live, as the Township Council and Board of Education are doing.Residents deserve to know what is happening on their street and in their town – in real time – whether or not they are physically able to attend a given meeting ...
