What happens when you renovate an historic city building that happens to house your bi-monthly city council meetings and other public meetings? You find a temporary location, of course.

But what about those meetings that get cablecast live?

In the summer of 2002, renovation of Historic City Hall in Springfield, Mo., began. This structure, first occupied in 1895, needed an extensive overhaul. Repairing an aging elevator forced the relocation of several public meetings since the third floor housed the council chambers area.

Simply changing a meeting location often requires little more than proper notification and perhaps a decent PA system.

In our case, however, it presented a new set of challenges not faced by many government video operations. Our chambers and adjacent video control room are equipped with five robotic cameras, a closed-caption decoder, a sound system with 19 microphones, and a direct coaxial/fiber link to our MSO's (Mediacom) headend for re-transmission of our signal to the more than 50,000 Springfield subscribers.

So what did we do? A little research and then lots of phone calls.The end result? We successfully televised four live public meetings from another facility.

So how did we do it? First we found a sound system with enough matching microphones from a local rental company. Next we needed a remote video truck. Springfield is not exactly a hotbed for live remotes so the local inventory is limited. However, an unlikely source was available. Evangel University, a small (1,600 students) liberal arts college, has a small truck capable of handling up to four cameras. The equipment is not state-of-the-art and the directing quarters are somewhat cramped, but once the cables were run and suitable electrical power was located, we were in business. Almost.

The temporary location was about 1/4 mile from our main master control room. Too long for a cable run, yet there was no way to get into the upstream path back to our cable system's headend. NBC to the rescue! Our local NBC affiliate, KY3, had a seldom-used portable microwave unit. So off to the roof!

Being careful not to look into the transmitter cone, we set up a tripod, placed the small bullhorn-looking device on top, and aimed it at our master control room through a narrow path between a couple of large trees. (This would have been much easier in the winter!) At the other end we set up our receiver in an open window, ran some cables to our control room, and voil! Pictures and sound! To the seasoned news photographer, this is a daily ritual that can be done while sleeping, but for us, it was a unique opportunity.

It was not the best-looking signal in the world, but we did make good on our attempt to provide timely information to our citizens. And, oh yes, we close-captioned some of those meetings too.

Our crew got some different experience, we showed our citizens and elected officials that we believe what we are doing is important to them, and it did not cost the proverbial arm and a leg. The entire month-long project cost less than $5,000 over our normal production expenses.

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