Surrey hits delete button on videos
Most area municipalities drop record of council meetings from their websites after a few years
It seems everything under the sun can be seen on video these days — except footage from certain city council meetings in Surrey.
“I’m unhappy. The videos are precious. You wouldn’t go back and destroy minutes of an 1883 meeting for no reason,” said north Surrey resident Grant Rice.
He was looking for information recently from a 2012 video that would help in a presentation he was making to council about wildlife protection in the Campbell Heights area, which is facing industrial development that puts a strain on deer, coyote and fox populations.
The video was gone. So were tapes of more than 150 meetings from 2011 to 2014, encompassing well over 500 hours of council business. As it turns out, Surrey only retains videos for two years and has no requirement to keep them in perpetuity, the same as other Metro Vancouver councils that were surveyed by Postmedia.
“Our videos are classified as temporary records,” said Surrey City Clerk Jane Sullivan. “We keep them for two years. It’s a normal records practice since we started . ... The only records we are officially required to keep are the minutes.”
At the present time, Surrey’s website displays even less than the mandated two-year period; videos are available only dating back to the beginning of 2016. Rice said it’s like “shredding documents.”
“The politicians are probably happy the records are gone,” he said.
Other Metro Vancouver cities polled by Postmedia follow essentially the same practice. Richmond, North Vancouver District, Burnaby, Coquitlam and Vancouver retain video records for differing periods of time, in some cases dating back to 2005, but none require them to be kept in perpetuity.
“There is no legislated requirement that videos be made available,” said Kathleen Vincent, Coquitlam’s manager of corporate communications. “We do this as a service to our constituents.”
The province, which governs cities under its municipal laws, does not require videos to be taken or held in storage.
Rice said it’s time that councils realized that the world is in a new technological age and people have heightened expectations of what they should be able to see.
“People expect videos these days. That’s how they get their information. They’re not going to sit through a six-hour council meeting, but they will go online to see a video,” he said.
Rice said councils should start seeing the easily stored digital files for what they are: the best record of what has transpired, what directions council has given and what promises have been made.
“Development happens at such a breakneck pace. People are trying to have a say. The videos are a quick way of getting up to speed on complex issues. The minutes are no substitute. A 20-minute oratory will be appear as three or four sentences,” he said.
Surrey considers itself at the cutting edge of transparency, said Coun. Bruce Hayne, who spearheads open data initiatives and holds the subject “near and dear.”
“A number of videos were deleted. Virtually no one wants to see them,” he said. “It does get expensive to archive these things. We can’t use the Google Cloud; it’s outside of the province. We’re restricted.”
But Hayne admitted the videos are a better “verbatim” record than edited minutes.
“If we heard from enough people and it was the will of council to keep video archives in perpetuity, there is a way to do that,” he said. “I would always rather have a (video) record which is as plain as the nose on your face so everyone would know what I said.”
Changes to video requirements would only be forthcoming if the province decided to enact legislation requiring the material to be kept. There are no plans to do so.
“The province has not considered legislative changes related to newly available technology,” said a province spokesperson.