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ELKINS -- Local city governments are taking different approaches in deciding how to have city council meetings during the coronavirus pandemic.
Today's regularly scheduled Elkins City Council meeting has been canceled, and officials have not yet determined how the meetings will take place in the near future.
Sutton Stokes, the city's external affairs specialist, said Elkins officials don't anticipate holding a meeting unless it complies with a recent directive from the West Virginia Ethics Commission.
The directive states that a governing body may call an emergency meeting to discuss or vote on an issue relating to the coronavirus outbreak, if immediate attention is required.
"Without commenting on what other cities are doing, we really don't want to take that approach," Stokes told The Inter-Mountain. "We are actively exploring options for enabling the public and media to join any upcoming council meetings while minimizing health risks, such as by providing a live stream via YouTube or a similar platform."
Meanwhile in Buckhannon, to encourage social distancing while providing transparent access to City business, the City and Channel 3 will be live streaming City Council meetings, beginning today.
The public is encouraged to participate in the meeting by watching online and submitting comments and questions in advance or following the meeting. All written comments will be shared with the members of Buckhannon City Council, a city press release stated Wednesday.
Additionally, you may send emails to buckhannon@buckhannonwv.org during the meeting and Callie Cronin Sams, information coordinator, will pass these to City Council if relevant to the topic being discussed. A full name, address indicating whether you are a City resident, email address or phone number must be included with the submitted comments.
Monday, we asked residents and businesses to conduct City business online or by phone if at all possible, rather than coming to City Hall in person. By providing access to City Council meetings online, we hope to further decrease the number of visitors to City Hall and the chance for the COVID-19 virus to spread as it enters our region.
Residents may view the City Council meetings at the Channel 3 YouTube channel.
Officials are also holding a city meeting of sorts in Belington tonight.
"There is not an online council meeting (tonight)," Belington Mayor Maureen Lasky-Setchell said Wednesday afternoon. "There's not going to be a council meeting in city hall. The council people will be just meeting in a conference call kind of thing because we have business that we have to attend to this week because of deadlines, but one of the things we will be discussing is putting council meetings on in the future. That's something we're going to discuss … so that people can watch the meetings."
"I've spoken with several other mayors and the city manager up in Philippi, the mayor in Buckhannon and Elkins, and we're all trying to coordinate how we're going to conduct our council meetings in light of the emergency proclamation that has been handed down by the governor.
"There was talk about not even having the council meeting, but we have business that needs to be attended to," the mayor said. "So, I spoke … Charleston, the Secretary of State and the governor's office. They assured me that we could do either a conference call to try to attend to the business at hand that needed to be dealt with, or we could try to use some sort of a format where -- it's not Skype, it's another format -- where we can all be together on a live stream thing. It's like a conference call only there's audio and video."
"So, that's what we're attempting to do, but at this point right now, the annual budgets for all municipalities are due to the auditor's office, and so, several of us mayors have contacted them. They have not extended the deadline. So, we're sort of all forced to have our council meetings right now," she said.
"We're sort of scrambling to put something together to make that happen, and nobody seems to have the absolute answer as far as everybody that I've spoken with, so we're sort of just winging it right now. It is in our agenda to in the future to livestream our council meetings for people who can't attend the meetings. We're going to find out the legalities of doing that, what the precedents before us have been and try to make that accessible to the people in our community."
Look for local city government updates in future editions of The Inter-Mountain and online at theintermountain.com.