Finance Committee - 02/19/2020 Page 10
Mr. Codagnone
Fancy tools? The presentation stuff is the really big improvement, there are going to be four 75 inch TV’s put
in; one on the east wall, one on the west wall and on the south beam there will be one angled up near the
ceiling facing the audience, another one up at the ceiling facing towards the President’s desk. So from any
area in the room you would be able to see the TV as well as the audience can see it. And also all new
microphones are going in. In the last Chamber, we had difficulty with the set-up where if somebody brought in
their own device — laptop to do presentations, sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn’t. If we called the
vendor, we pay this hefty fee. So we were adamant that we weren't going to use any of the equipment and we
are getting all new equipment just to do those presentations.
Alderwoman Kelly
Just to follow on to the presentation thing, are you going to do something that’s like a Bluetooth or airplay or
something that’s easy without having to have multiple ...
Mr. Codagnone
Right now it’s HDMI. The difficulty is we really don’t know what people are going to bring in for device. They
could bring in an antique lap top that only have a VGA connector or they could bring in something state of the
art. You know, we have adapters that will work with [Pads and Android Tablets and things like that. It’s very
difficult to know what somebody is going to bring in.
Alderwoman Kelly
Yeah | appreciate that thank you.
Alderwoman Lu
Just being new to this, | was a little surprised that this was being presented in the middle of the process. Is this
just something that doesn’t have to be completed?
Mr. Codagnone
No it has to be completed.
Alderwoman Lu
During the renovations?
Mr. Codagnone
This one took longer mainly because we had to go out to rebid, a second bid with the vendors. We were fairly
clear on what we wanted and what we did not want. We made it clear that we weren’t going to reuse a lot of
the old equipment that was not working well. Two of the vendor’s proposals included re-using the old
equipment.
And then one of the vendors proposed using wireless microphones which would be problematic, they would
have to be taken out every night, recharged and then brought back in before every meeting. There is the
potential that the batteries could go dead half-way through a meeting. So we basically had to tell them all “go
back and figure it out and re-bid”. Vhen we got the new proposals | think they understood what we were
looking for at that point.
