BY ANDY GARDNER
North Country This Week

MASSENA -- The Town Council did not webstream their September meeting.

The town supervisor says this is because the councilor who runs their Facebook Live sessions doesn’t feel he can adequately participate in the meeting, while monitoring the FB Live chat feature.

“The way that we’ve been doing it is Sam Carbone has been setting it all up and running it during the meeting. We really don’t have any other IT person capable of doing it,” Town Supervisor Steve O’Shaughnessy said. “He found it too distracting to be running that and looking at what’s being commented on to pay attention to the meeting.”

Facebook Live does not currently allow the host to disable comments on a livestream. The Village Board of Trustees holds their meetings in the same room as the Town Council, Room 30 upstairs in the Town Hall, and uses AV equipment in the room to broadcast via Zoom.

O’Shaughnessy said the town board stopped using Zoom because they were infiltrated by mischief-makers and “Zoom bombed.” That means a hacker hijacks the feed.

In the town’s case several months ago, the feed was bombarded with obscenities and racial slurs. There are other live online cloud conferencing platforms that function like Zoom and allow broadcasts, such as Go To Meeting and Google Hangouts.

The supervisor said Village Administrator Monique Chatland sets up and runs the AV equipment and Zoom meetings for the village.

“We have nobody that can run it,” O’Shaughnessy said.

Responding to an inquiry from North Country This Week, Chatland said she has spoken with O’Shaughnessy about doing webcast meetings, and said she is available to assist them.

“I have had numerous conversations with Town officials, specifically Supervisor O’Shaughnessy, regarding the AV equipment and continuous implementation of virtual meetings in Room #30, even inquiring about splitting the costs, although minimal, as a tax saving effort,” Chatland said in her email.

“The Village has purchased or has had donated the required equipment to continually hold our meetings virtually, both of which the Town has had the opportunity to utilize. The Village is always willing to assist the Town of Massena, or anyone, an effort to better serve our constituents.”

When Chatland runs the Zoom meetings for the village, she sends a link to the public that puts them in a virtual waiting room, and from there she only lets in people who she believes are watching for a legitimate purpose, which is aimed at preventing Zoom bombing. All users except for the boardroom and any speaking village officials or commenting members of the public get their video and microphone capabilities unlocked, at Chatland’s discretion.

O’Shaughnessy says the Town Council conformed with all state Open Meetings Law requirements for their Wednesday, Sept. 15 meeting, and they had made an announcement in August that they would cease the webstreams.

“We’re still using all the acceptable guidelines for this meeting. And at last month’s meeting, I believe we announced we weren’t going to be doing that anymore. John Michaud was there last month. This month he wasn’t there,” the supervisor said. Michaud is a local historian and documentarian who often films town and village government meetings, and then posts them online on Youtube where they can be watched for free. Since the pandemic, Michaud has not been the regular fixture that he was prior to COVID-19.

O’Shaughnessy said upcoming meetings would include notices of whether or not the meeting will be streamed online.