Clerk clarifies process

Alexis Barker
NLJ News Editor
 
Making the recordings of the meetings of the Weston County commissioners available on the county website is not something new, according to Weston County Clerk Becky Hadlock. The recordings have been available online the entire time she has been in office, beginning in 2018, and previous clerk Jill Sellers also made the recordings accessible online, Hadlock said. 
However, the recordings are not immediately
available after a meeting, she said. There is a delay of up to one year from the meeting date until it is available online. 
“The files are too big to send to the tech guy electronically for upload, that is why they are not uploaded regularly,” Hadlock told the News Letter Journal.
Instead, the clerk waits until all of a year’s meetings are complete before she loads the audio to a disk to be mailed to Wyoming Network Inc., the company the county contracts with for website services.
Those recordings for the year just ended are then uploaded. The previous year’s recordings are removed from the website. 
“2019’s recordings came down when 2020’s went up,” Hadlock said, noting that this is done because of website storage space and the cost. 
“This issue has to do with how the county’s recordings are made,” said Dave Lerner, president of Wyoming Network. “They are huge files and are too large to email. The county’s hosting company – Jubjub.com – has said it would have to charge extra for hosting space because of how large the files are, so the county is only listing one year’s recordings at a time. If the county could compress the files into a smaller size, it could have multiple years on the website, and possibly email them.” 
Once Wyoming Network receives a year’s worth of recordings, Lerner said, they are available on the county’s website within 24 hours. He noted that the county has unlimited updates, so there would be no additional cost to have the recordings uploaded on a more regular basis. 
“We are on a flat fee, and the county has unlimited updates, and as I mentioned, they are done very quickly,” Lerner said. “We also update the county website on election nights at no additional charge.” 
According to Lerner, Wyoming Network has been working with Weston County since 2010, completing several designs of the website per the contract, at no additional charge.