The Long Beach City Council decided Tuesday night to keep meeting remotely but also speed up the process of putting its members on camera for the first time since the pandemic closed City Hall last year.

For months now, the council has been holding meetings virtually, with members appearing only by audio. City Clerk Monique De La Garza said that the city’s technology team is working to create an effective patch to string together multiple meeting technologies to end that audio-only streak, potentially in the next few weeks.

However, a discussion to return to in-person meetings as soon as possible was quickly squashed by a majority of the council who opposed it on the grounds of safety. City Council members have already been vaccinated against COVID-19, but they pointed to their individual staff members have not, and city employees’ unions have not been alerted to these potential workplace changes.

“I think a year has exhausted all of us, but I think we need to do that with all the safety measures in place, and right now I don’t think it’s safe,” said Councilwoman Mary Zendejas.

Councilman Roberto Uranga made the motion to focus on video rather than returning to in-person meetings and also asked for a report detailing the issues involved with safely returning to the council chambers.

Zendejas noted that she’s been asking about including a video broadcast of the council meetings for months, but the council has continued to operate without showing their faces to the public since City Hall was closed last March.

Meanwhile, the wait for them to return to the council chambers in person is likely to continue for a while.

City Manager Tom Modica said that while some city employees, including the City Council, were designated as essential to the continuity of government, others were left out and could remain ineligible for the vaccine for weeks. City department heads, managers and other staff that could be required to attend meetings to give presentations remain unvaccinated.

“We still have a ways to go before we can have all of our staff be vaccinated,” Modica said.

But a combination of the city’s falling infection rates, the possibility that state rules might allow some of city workers to be reclassified and an expected increase in vaccine supply could speed up the process of getting necessary staff members vaccinated.

Councilman Al Austin proposed the item to bring back in-person meetings as a way to increase transparency he said. He pointed to the numerous technical glitches, distractions and the lack of being able to see each other, and the public’s ability to see them, that could solved by meeting in person.

However, he qualified his request by adding that he didn’t want to put anyone in danger. He ultimately supported the vote to push for a video alternative but said that the current state of the vaccine rollout could put the city in a good place in the coming weeks to revisit the topic.

“There’s no reason for me to die on this sword for having in-person City Council meetings, but I do think we should be thinking about this, planning for that and we should be transparent with the public about giving an expectation on what that looks like,” Austin said.