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 in person. With our current technology, over the past several years, nobody has needed to miss out on a meeting if they are sick or otherwise unable to attend. There are elderly residents who could not make it to meetings in person, but were still able to watch them, for example. What is the reason that this needs to change, after three and a half years of providing this access to the community?
We understand why the Zoning Board applicants should attend meetings in person to discuss the matters on the agenda when possible, and we fully agree with that decision. Though it is worth asking: what does the Zoning Board plan to do if an applicant is unable to physically attend a hearing, after that has not been an issue for so long?
But applicants attending in person should have no bearing on whether or not these meetings are livestreamed to the public, as they once were. Why should concerned residents be required to show up at Town Hall when they have not needed to do so for quite some time now? It is worth noting, also, that people deserve to know what is happening in real time, not days after the fact.
If we sound like a broken record on this matter, we agree with you. We are surprised that several of the town’s governing bodies have provided such pushback about providing fair and equitable access to all of their residents – the same equitable access that they have enjoyed for several years. We are shocked that it remains an ongoing issue. What is the justifiable reason for doing this?
The good news is that this issue can be fixed with the simple click of a button. The cameras and microphones are already set up in Town Hall and recording, so the meetings just need to be livestreamed like they had been since early 2020. Again, this should not be difficult. The Zoning Board’s next meeting is scheduled for September 12. We hope to see this change by then.
