GLOVERSVILLE — The Common Council on Tuesday night voted unanimously 7-0 to begin a Request for Proposals [RFP] process to solicit professional videography services for the city.
Mayor Vince DeSantis said it is his belief that hiring a professional videographer to produce videos for the city — videos that can be posted and shared on social media — is an important part of having a modern communications strategy for city government because video content is a popular and effective method for conveying information to the general public.
“We want to do this contract for videographic services because 2022 will be a very high profile year for Gloversville,” DeSantis said.
The resolution was sponsored by 6th Ward Councilman Wrandy Siarkowski and calls for businesses or individuals interested in submitting proposals to provide the city of Gloversville with a minimum of six videos a month to be used exclusively on the City of Gloversville website and Facebook page or however the city’s “marketing board” deems fit.
“Any content created under this scope of work is property of the City and is not to be disseminated without the City’s consent,” reads the resolution. “Two of the six monthly videos must include live streaming of Common Council meetings on the second and fourth Tuesday of every month.”
The specifications for the videography services RFP also included these other five potential categories of videos that could be produced by a videographer for the city:
• $10 million Downtown Revitalization Initiative [DRI] process
• City projects
• City businesses/grand openings
• City meetings
• City events
“We want to get somebody who can be at every meeting of the DRI Local Planning Committee and at every council meeting and make sure that everything gets videographed, filmed, and then put out to the public,” DeSantis said. “All of the meetings will be public, and there are several other initiatives that we’re doing that are outside of the DRI, in terms of neighborhood improvement, so it’s going to be a very, very busy year. We’re going to need to make sure that the rest of the world knows about what we’re doing.”
This is the second time in the past three years that Gloversville has sought to hire a professional videographer. During the April 23, 2019 meeting the council voted to hire city resident Osama Mustafa, authorizing him to purchase of $2,220 worth of videography equipment and to enter a contract with Mustafa through Oct. 23, 2019 at a rate of $25 per hour, not to exceed 120 hours per month. The council chose Mustafa after he and Keith Shoemaker were the two respondents to the city’s RFP for videography services in 2019.
Later on May 10, 2019 Gloversville entered into a 90-day contract with Mustafa to provide videography services at a flat rate of $3,000 per month on a full-time basis, and then in August extended that contract until the end of 2019.
Since then the city has been without a professional videographer, however, DeSantis said Mustafa has, at times, done some free videography work for the city, such as a video posted in July of DeSantis and outgoing Director of Public Works Chris Perry explaining the city’s flood mitigation efforts for the city’s …….