Click here for council meetings Click here for council meetings (December 17, 2003)

** Meetings may be seen, heard on the Internet.

By Rebecca Wallace
Almanac Staff Writer

Instead of languishing in a lingering city council meeting, waiting for that one item on the dog park, imagine watching the meeting later on your own home computer, and clicking right to the segment you want to see.

With grants announced last week, that vision took a step closer to reality for the Menlo Park, Atherton, Palo Alto and East Palo Alto city councils.

The volunteer board of Cable Co-op decided on 26 recipients -- government organizations, nonprofit groups, and schools -- of grants made possible by $4 million left over from the sale of the principal Cable Co-op assets to AT&T Broadband (now Comcast), Co-op chairman Seth Fearey said.

One $303,000 grant awarded to the Midpeninsula Community Media Center will pay for several projects, including providing some initial funding for streaming local council meetings over the Internet. Media Center officials are meeting this week on hiring someone to set up that service, executive director Annie Niehaus said.

Ideally, the service would include indexing so that a viewer could search a council agenda to jump right to his or her issue of choice, she said. It would also include archiving past meetings.

It could be several months before the service is up and running, Ms. Niehaus said.

Menlo Park and Palo Alto already air their council meetings on local television through the Media Center, and last week's grants also included a $50,000 award for Atherton to begin airing its meetings as well, Linda Kelly, assistant to the city manager, said.

That amount will pay for some of the equipment needed, but the town had requested a $190,000 grant and will have to also look at other sources of funding, Ms. Kelly said.

Other Cable Co-op grants included funding for a computer upgrade for Menlo-Atherton High School's English department and for televising East Palo Alto's council meetings.

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