City looking to upgrade communications

Kyle is looking into ways to improve its communications capabilities — both internally as well as with local constituents. Part of the effort was achieved Wednesday when the city council voted unanimously to approve a proposal from Time Warner Cable to connect all city office locations to a fiber ethernet network. This will not only improve communications from, say, City Hall to the Public Works Department, but will also enhance the city’s ability to stream city council meetings.

It probably won’t do anything to improve the quality of those videos, however. Acting City Manager James Earp announced plans to solve that part of the riddle when he told the council Wednesday about the Granicus Project which Earp promises will vastly improve the city’s interaction with its constituents.

"First, within six weeks we should be up and running on the boards and commissions project," Earp told the council. "It’s a better way to manage those folks who are applying and wishing to be on committees. It’s a better way for you to review applicants and for us to manage committees and to be aware of when people’s terms are expiring. It’s a way for people to apply, tell us what they’re interested in and submit resumes. It’s going to be an amazing tool.

"The second part (of the Granicus Project) will take a little longer to implement," he said. "You’ve had a lot of complaints about the quality of the video for council meetings. The video we do get is a very cheap product. The second prong of this project is going to provide a very professional video stream.

"As a citizen at home, if you’re interested in what happened concerning one particular agenda item you can click on that item and it will take you to that discussion in the video.. Another benefit is that it is so robust it can take the place of the verbatim written (council meeting) minutes, because now the video becomes the record of the meeting. And that means the city secretary doesn’t have to take the recordings of the meetings and transcribe every single word which saves hours upon hours upon hours of labor. So that’s two very important pieces. That will probably come in January.

"Finally we looking at Granicus to replace our entire agenda process. Everything will be all inter-related and inter-connected and work together in harmony."

Almost sounds like a Paul McCartney-Stevie Wonder song.

You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows

Now folks in Kyle have two ways to determine the current weather conditions in the community. One is the old fashioned way: just stick your head out the door.

But Acting City Manager James Earp unveiled a new way during Wednesday’s city council meeting. Go to the city’s web site, click on the "Community" tab and then acess "Kyle Weather Data" from the drop down menu. It’s actually a pretty neat page. You can see the current temperature, the forecast high and low for the day, humidity, dew point, atmospheric pressure, rainfall amounts, wind direction and speed as well as a table illustrating the "5 minute wind interval."

Now you can’t get all that just by sticking your head out the door.