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Portsmouth’s Peter Roberts receives PCC Citizens Award

He’s recorded every Town Council meeting since pandemic began

Posted 1/21/21

PORTSMOUTH — If you ever need to review a Town Council meeting from March 2020 to the present, you can thank Peter Roberts for preserving it for prosperity.

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Please support local news coverage –

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Portsmouth’s Peter Roberts receives PCC Citizens Award

He’s recorded every Town Council meeting since pandemic began

Posted

PORTSMOUTH — If you ever need to review a Town Council meeting from March 2020 to the present, you can thank Peter Roberts for preserving it for prosperity.

Mr. Roberts is a member of the taxpayer group Portsmouth Concerned Citizens’ (PCC) Executive Committee as well as its camera crew, which records council meetings that are played on the Public Access Channel on cable television, and stored on DVD for town records in the Town Clerk’s Office.

When public access to the Town Council Chambers was shut down on March 16, 2020 due to Covid-19, the PCC continued to record council meetings in that room with the agreement of Town Clerk Jennifer West. 

Mr. Roberts has recorded every council meeting since March 16, 2020 by himself, as other PCC camera operators were not available due to heightened risk to their health.

Since last March, the council has conducted its meetings via the Zoom conferencing system, but has managed that streaming effort in Council Chambers. This has allowed Mr. Roberts to continue video recordings of council meetings using the hearing-impaired radio transmission system to record high-quality sound, a marked improvement over Zoom’s capabilities.

“As a consequence, the recordings played over the public access cable station and posted on the town’s website did not suffer from the very poor audio quality of the Zoom system,” the PCC said in a prepared statement. 

The dedication shown by Mr. Roberts ensured that this critical information system continued uninterrupted throughout the year.

“Throughout our experience in local government, we have learned that citizen involvement is key to responsive and effective administration of town affairs,” stated the PCC, which honored Mr. Roberts with its Citizens Award. “Mr. Roberts’ dedication preserved citizen oversight of Portsmouth’s government and in turn its service to our citizens. Without it, this program would likely have failed.

“The PCC was therefore to meet its commitment to citizen access to quality recordings of council meetings in a year in which a number of critical decisions were made by town government. We extend our appreciation to Mr. Roberts for his dedicated service to the citizens of Portsmouth, Rhode Island.”

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