‘People must think we are a joke’ – council equipment upgrade plea for licensing committee

Calls have been made for Wrexham Council to either invest in new microphones or introduce better scheduling of meetings as microphone issues are interfering with the business of a committee.

Wrexham Council recently upgraded one set of microphones after ongoing issues with the old equipment, cumulating in the Executive Board earlier this year seeing farcical scenes with sound cutting out, buttons being pressed too many times, microphones being swapped and some councillors being inaudible to anyone that wasn’t sat next to them – and the meeting actually having to be stopped due to audio issues. (We have documented issues with microphones back to 2011).

However Vice Chairman of the Council’s Licensing Committee, Cllr Alan Edwards, yesterday told the Democratic Services Committee Meeting Room 1 via a retro-mic that “we look like a joke to be honest”.

The committee uses a different meeting room than the main Guildhall chamber, and had what we are told could be microphones dating back to the late 1990’s.

Cllr Edwards said: “People must think we are a joke. The mics down here are old, they make us out to be a joke.

“Members of the public come in and can be nervous public speaking before a group of councillors, and recently we had a number in, as it was an item with witnesses. We were asking them to turn the microphones on and off, they wont come on, it is really, really embarrassing.

“Why can’t we book the meeting in the chamber upstairs? The calendar is twelve months in advance. If we can’t can we look at investing in the microphones down here. We look like a joke to be honest.”

Cllr Dana Davies asked why the upstairs new microphones could not be brought downstairs to the meeting room, but was told by Cllr Edwards that they were ‘different systems’ and incompatible, something Cllr Davies appeared to dispute pointing out that the new system upstairs had been trialed in the current room.

Cllr Edwards pointed to comedian Norman Collier’s act to describe how meetings progress, with unconfirmed reports that below is infact a bootleg copy of a meeting video…

Top pic: The new microphones, upstairs in the Guildhall main chamber, that work.