Live, from Newport

Tucked away in a windowless storage closet behind the dais in council chambers at Newport Beach City Hall is a growing cable television station that reaches about 28,000 households in Newport Beach.

Production director Dominic Dimare never quite knows when his night will end when he walks into the roughly 10-foot-wide room two Tuesdays a month to operate the city’s robotic cameras during city council meetings, which sometimes drag past midnight as residents and council members debate obscure passages of city code.

“It takes a special type of person to do what we do,” Dimare said.

A year ago this week, NBTV took control of broadcasting its own city council meetings live from Time Warner Cable.

The city has rapidly been building its own cable television station with original programming from the ground up over the past few years.

NBTV produces eight to 10 original programs a month on everything from youth flag football and lifeguard tryouts to local history, all of it from a stuffy broom closet behind council chambers.

Although his day job is in sales for a food supply company, Dimare has worked in his spare time for about 15 years broadcasting city council meetings for cities across Orange County.

With a constant parade of heated local issues such as residents lobbying for the city to crack down on drug and rehabilitation homes in the city, Newport consistently has the most lively, and sometimes the longest, meetings, he said.

Involved citizens abound in Newport, with its numerous citizen activist groups focusing on everything from preserving Newport Bay to expanding the number of soccer fields in the city.

A steady stream of residents line up at the podium during public comment time at the council meetings, sometimes stretching as long as three hours.

In contrast, a council meeting in Buena Park can run 45 minutes, Dimare said.

“It seems like people here care more,” Dimare said. “There’s more controversy here, more issues that people are involved in.”

There’s no 7-second delay during live broadcasts in case a bawdy word slips past the mouth of the councilman or a resident during a heated exchange.

Luckily, such occurrences are rare, said Casi Smith, a part-time videographer, editor and archivist for NBTV.

“It’s public record, so we don’t alter it in any way,” she said.