Streaming video of public meetings will be offered this spring by Napa County; the cities of Napa, American Canyon and Yountville; and the Napa Valley Unified School District.

Government junkies and anyone interested in a particular issue will be able to not only watch local meetings live over the Internet but retrieve video of past meetings using their computer.

Video will be available of most city council, board of supervisors, planning commission and school board meetings.

Until now, live cable transmissions of government meetings have been available only to Comcast subscribers. Anyone with a satellite system or a TV antenna was left out in the cold, said Dan Monez, executive director of Napa Valley TV.

Video of local government and school board meetings will now be available to anyone with a high-speed Internet connection, Monez said. For the first time, video archives will be available at each jurisdiction’s Web site.

“It’s so cool,” Monez said. From the comfort of home, a resident can monitor local meetings as they occur, or delve into the archive for a better understanding of what happened.

The video archive should end disputes over who said what at a government meeting, Monez said. The video will tell the tale.

Archives will be searchable so a person doesn’t have to sit through an entire two- or three-hour video replay to get to the item they want, Monez said.

“This is a huge leap forward for someone who wants to see what was said and by whom at City Council or Planning Commission meetings,” said Barry Martin, the city’s public outreach coordinator.

A Napa resident who is on the road will be able to watch a council meeting from their hotel room, Martin said.

If a local child is receiving a Student of the Month award at a school board meeting, grandma back in Minnesota will be able to watch live over her home computer, Monez said.

“Streaming video offers greater transparency in government,” Martin said. “We always want people to be more involved in the decision-making process.”

The Napa Valley Unified School District debuted the new technology at its April 17 school board meeting. The Napa City Council will begin streaming video on Tuesday.

American Canyon and Napa County are scheduled to begin streaming video soon, Monez said. Yountville will begin contracting with Napa Valley TV in July.

The new video technology could allow the NVUSD to offer both programming for students and professional development classes for teachers over the Internet, said Laurel Krsek, the district’s technology director.

For now, the district is fine-tuning streaming video and video archiving of school board meetings, Krsek said. Last week the district added software beneficial for Macintosh computers and improved searchability, she said.

Napa Valley TV, formerly called Napa TV, is coordinating the Internet service for all but Napa County. By working together, local jurisdictions were able to buy the service at a discount from Granicus, a San Francisco company that has state-of-the-art software, Monez said.

Cities and counties have been offering streaming video for nearly a decade, but the service was initially expensive, Martin said.

Napa is paying $10,000 for the Granicus software and staff training, with a monthly service fee of $740, City Clerk Sara Cox said.

Monez American Canyon paid more for a top-of-the-line Granicus package that will help the city clerk’s office with recording minutes. Smaller cities pay a lesser monthly fee.

Comcast cable has been carrying local government meetings live since 1988, Monez said. School board meetings have been taped and cablecast the next day.

Napa recently upgraded its Web site so that audio recordings of meetings could be played.

The new video archives are not designed to be downloaded. This means the best moments of a Napa City Council meeting should not be showing up on YouTube, Monez said.  

For the new service to work, a person will need both a high-speed Internet connection and Microsoft’s Media Player, which can be downloaded from each jurisdiction’s Web site. Archive search can be problematic for some Macintosh computers.

Napa will create a video link on Monday at cityofnapa.org for Tuesday’s video debut, Martin said.