After two more hours of debate Monday night, the South Bend Common Council approved new fees the public will be charged for copies of police dash and body cam videos.
The council voted 7-2 to create a new $25 hourly fee, capped at $75 for three hours, for the videos, which are public records under state law. That’s half the size of the fees initially proposed by the bill last month.
City corporate counsel Sheila Kennedy has said city legal staff are spending too much time redacting confidential information from the videos before releasing them to requestors. They hope the fees will make people more carefully request videos.
The council voted down a motion from Council Member Oliver Davis to postpone the vote another two weeks. Davis fears people can’t afford the fees, even the smaller ones, and he wants to increase next year’s city budget to pay for the redacting.
But council member Sheila Niezgodski said the council had debated the bill enough.
“We have had so much public input and comment on this bill, and what I see is a compromise," Niezgodski said. "Let’s remember the legal department presented this bill to us, they reached out for help, they said they were under water, so I’m just struggling to see why it’s so hard to get to a compromise.”
