Lights, Cameras Don’t Hinder Board Action

The cameras that Orange County supervisors quibbled over for months hardly made a difference Tuesday night as the board worked through the agenda for its first televised meeting.

Though supervisors and speakers during public comment periods may have been a bit more deliberate than usual, business was transacted: The board heard a report on a five-year plan to tackle illegal medical clinics, reviewed the district attorney’s ideas for curtailing illegal pharmaceutical sales at storefront operations, and approved a plan to raise fees for concealed-weapon permits.

The meeting, the first of three to be taped for later broadcast, is part of a pilot project to determine whether to continue televising the meetings.

A Time Warner crew of seven donated time and equipment for the test. Three mobile cameras and one stationary camera were in the board chambers while a director, video engineer, graphic artist and audio engineer worked in a production truck outside.

Until Tuesday, Orange County had been one of the few in the state that did not broadcast board meetings, even though 75% of the public in a Times Orange County poll said they wanted to see the sessions on television.

KOCE, the county’s public broadcasting station, will air Tuesday’s meeting between 1 and 5 a.m. Saturday.

Bruce Reed, KOCE’s station manager, predicted that supervisors’ sessions “won’t be one of our hottest programs. It won’t make it in our top 10.”

He would not predict how many viewers the broadcasts might draw and did not have viewership figures by time slots, but said about 2.5 million viewers tune in KOCE each week.

Tapes of the meetings also will be copied and distributed to the six cable companies that serve the county and its 32 cities.

On the issue of concealed weapons permits, the board approved a plan to charge applicants $100 for a new permit, $25 for a renewal and $10 to amend a license. The fees would increase annually with inflation but would not exceed the cost to the county for processing applications.

A recent Sheriff’s Department study found that the cost of processing applications far exceeds the current $5 fee now levied by the county for background fingerprint checks. The study said that on average the department spends $224 to process each new application, $73 for each renewal and $12 for each amendment.

The fee increase was proposed after Sheriff Mike Carona pledged to approve more permits than his predecessor, Brad Gates. The new fee would be in addition to state license costs.

A permit allows the holder to carry a revolver, which generally holds five or six rounds of ammunition, or a semiautomatic handgun, which can hold as many as 15 rounds.