Let the meeting come to you

Interested in keeping up with important decisions affecting the environment and land use in L.A. County? Regional Planning Commission meetings are now just a mouse click away. It’s no longer necessary to dig through pages of transcripts to see what happened, and you won’t need to make a long trek across town to show up in person, either. Beginning this week, live and recorded Regional Planning meetings will be available online, in living color, at http://planning.lacounty.gov/video.

The Regional Planning Commission covers many issues that affect residents in unincorporated areas of the Third District. Upcoming decisions include adopting a new general plan for Los Angeles County, which will literally shape unincorporated communities for generations to come.  It will affect how much development will occur in sensitive natural environments countywide, as well as developments affecting individual neighborhoods from Topanga Canyon to Universal City.

Systems analyst Dennis Slavin spearheaded the effort to update the technology of the meeting room and offer a bird’s-eye view of the meetings to the public.  His goal was to make it easier for residents to participate, and to improve the transparency and efficiency of the process.  When he took on the project, the room’s technology had not been updated in nearly a half-century.  Presentations involved paper maps that were difficult to see even for those present at the meetings.  Now, “meetings include visual presentations and GIS mapping, a full production that will provide a quality presentation to the public,” Slavin says.

In addition to streaming video of the meeting, the webcasts also allow viewers to get a close-up look at materials being presented and to access documents like the meeting agenda from the same screen.

You can sample the new technology by tuning in to the next commission meeting, on Wednesday, November 10.

Posted 11/4/10