Part 3 of 3 in Three Ways In, a series on the Community Media Archive: government access.
In 2017 the town of Dover, Massachusetts held its Annual Town Meeting. In a New England open town meeting every registered voter who comes gets a vote, and a lot of Dover came. As the meeting opens, the moderator reports that six hundred people have already signed in and more than a thousand are expected. Overflow seating has been set up in the cafeteria and the gym. Dover Sherborn Cable recorded all of it (4 hr 44 min).
Nearly five hours of neighbors working through budgets and bylaws is not light viewing. It is also a complete record of a town making its decisions in the open, available to every resident who couldn’t get a seat. Three years earlier, the town of Northfield opened its own annual meeting (1 hr 47 min) by presenting a new town flag, which voters had approved the year before, and thanking the residents who designed it.
Both of those meetings were recorded by public access stations, which in New England often cover town meeting. That’s a reminder that the labels in this series belong to channels, not programs. Government programming shows up on all three kinds of channel. It is still the core of the 1,193 government access station collections in the Community Media Archive, which hold more than 1.4 million videos and at least 132 years of running time, more than public and educational access combined. At least a third of those videos are meetings. This post is about the meetings, and also about everything else a government channel makes. Every video linked here runs longer than three minutes.
Meetings are the backbone of government access, and they are worth watching for the forums as much as for the votes. In Stevens Point, Wisconsin, the League of Women Voters held a forum on a school referendum (1 hr 16 min) in October 2018, and the city channel carried it.
The oldest meeting I found is about the channels themselves. On February 4, 1988, the Sacramento Metropolitan Cable Television Commission (1 hr 6 min), the public body that oversaw cable service and its access channels in the Sacramento area, called the roll and welcomed a newly elected city council member as a commissioner. The chair notes for the record that the meeting is being videotaped in its entirety, and so it was.
Between meetings, government channels explain the machinery. In Connersville, Indiana, Miss Lisa from the Fayette County Public Library took her children’s program Science Isn’t Scary to the wastewater treatment plant (7 min), where the superintendent, Erin Johnson, explains what happens to everything that goes down the drain. Bellingham, Washington built a whole Water School, including a virtual tour of both of its treatment plants (8 min).
DeKalb, Illinois spent a shift with its firefighters in A Day in the Life of a Firefighter (1 hr 16 min), which starts with the crew at Station 3 dividing up the housework. Scottsdale, Arizona introduced Castro, one of its police dogs (28 min). Hampton, Virginia compressed three weeks of archaeological digging (7 min) into a time-lapse. The dig was looking for evidence of the Grand Contraband Camp, where people who had freed themselves from slavery settled during the Civil War. And in 1989, before the new Sacramento County Jail opened, Metro Cable took viewers on a tour of the empty building (7 min).
In an emergency, the government channel is where a town hears from the people in charge. A month before the 2025 hurricane season, Port St. Lucie, Florida’s director of emergency management, Billy Weinshank, explained what it means when the city “activates” (33 min) for a storm. Fort Collins, Colorado kept its record of the night of July 28, 1997 (10 min), when Spring Creek flooded and five people died.
Some of what these channels record is grief. On the longest night of 2024, Clackamas County, Oregon held a memorial vigil (46 min) for the people in the county who had experienced homelessness and died that year.
Government channels are also there when a town welcomes new residents. In Ellicott City, Howard County, Maryland recorded fifty immigrants from 24 nations becoming United States citizens (48 min). Arlington County, Virginia recorded a naturalization ceremony at its public library (41 min), where Mayari Loza sang the national anthem.
They record how a place marks its history and its seasons. St. Paul, Minnesota held a Black History Month celebration at City Hall (51 min) in 2011. In Fitchburg, Wisconsin, Bill Quackenbush, Tribal Historic Preservation Officer for the Ho-Chunk Nation, spoke on the relevance of oral history in the 21st century (1 hr 20 min). Rialto, California’s Spanish-language program Pulso de la Comunidad did an episode on quinceañeras (22 min). And in Springfield, Missouri, Mayor Ken McClure started the holidays with the tree lighting on Park Central Square (1 hr 25 min).
A lot of what a government channel carries is simply helpful. Albuquerque’s Poets in the Libraries (38 min) holds a reading at each of the city’s public libraries, with featured poets who live nearby and community poets who “may be long-published or first time readers.” Clackamas County carried OSU Master Gardener Sherry Sheng on pruning trees and shrubs (43 min). Lake Havasu City, Arizona runs the Western Arizona Humane Society’s Adopt-A-Pet Show (30 min). Groton, Connecticut went along on a senior center hike from Coogan Farm to the Denison Pequotsepos Nature Center (13 min).
Some city channels open the studio to residents, much as public access does. Midland, Michigan’s MCTV carried the Midland Community Orchestra’s spring concert (1 hr 2 min), produced by Cindy Mikilun. The description underneath gives the station’s phone number for anyone who would like to produce a program of their own.
A government channel is a town explaining itself to itself: how the water gets clean, who the new citizens are, what the storm plan is, and how the vote went. Keeping those tapes means the explanation lasts.