Ohio House Bill 315, which went into effect April 9, gives municipalities and local law enforcement agencies the option to charge for public records requests of video footage produced from police department cameras. (Photo courtesy of Axon)
Village Council considers fees for police camera records requests
- Published: April 16, 2025
At the most recent Village Council meeting, Monday, April 7, the group weighed a piece of legislation that would allow the Village to charge for public records requests of video footage taken by the Yellow Springs Police Department.
The proposed resolution stipulates that the Village may charge individuals or organizations $75 per hour of law enforcement video footage produced from body-worn cameras or police cruisers. The total charge per recording cannot exceed $750.
Much of the language of and rationale behind the resolution stems from Ohio House Bill 315, which went into effect April 9.
Ultimately, Village Council members did not vote on the proposed resolution, tabling the decision until the next meeting, April 21.
Ahead of delaying the vote, though, the group considered a number of dimensions to these public record request fees, namely: Should every requester incur the charges equally? Who can be legally exempt? And how can the Village mitigate the volume of requests, and at the same time, be compensated for the time-intensive process of fulfilling these requests?
Background and HB 315
Earlier this year, on Jan. 2, Gov. DeWine signed HB 315 — a sizable, 450-page omnibus bill — into law, following a 17-hour legislative session in the Ohio General Assembly at the end of 2024. In addition to public records, the bill deals with notary law, limited liability companies, compensation for student athletes and more.
No public hearings were held on the line items regarding public records before the bill’s signing.
After HB 315 was signed into law, Gov. DeWine issued a public statement indicating that the intent of the bill was not to limit the public and media’s access to public records, rather to strike a “workable compromise to balance the modern realities of preparing these public records and the cost it takes to prepare them.”
“Law enforcement-worn cameras and dashboard cameras have been a major improvement for both law enforcement investigations and for accountability,” DeWine said. “However, I am sensitive to the fact that this changing technology has affected law enforcement by oftentimes creating unfunded burdens on these agencies, especially when it comes to the often time consuming and labor-intensive work it takes to provide them as public records.”
In his statement, DeWine said some of the primary targets of his bill are private companies and individuals “seeking to make money” from police videos by sharing them on media platforms and social media alongside advertisements.
Village Solicitor Amy Blankenship noted at Monday’s Council meeting — just two days before HB 315 went into effect April 9 — that the change to the Ohio Revised Code regarding public record requests is “significant.”
“It’s the first time we’ve ever seen the General Assembly put language in the Public Records Act that allows a local government to charge for the act of preparing public records for release,” Blankenship told Council members.
Blankenship pointed out that, as outlined in HB 315, local law enforcement agencies and governments are given the option to enact the fee schedule or not. In other words, the Village of Yellow Springs could elect to ignore HB 315, and continue to provide all individuals with their requested public records — video or otherwise — at no cost.
According to Clerk of Council Judy Kintner, some area news agencies and individuals have utilized that free access to records by requesting many hours of local footage, thus burdening her and YSPD Property Room Manager Jeff Beam.
“The last few major incidents we’ve had,” Kintner said, referring to the two homicides that have occurred in the village over the last two years, “we’ve had a couple local news agencies — and I do not mean the Yellow Springs News, but from the wider locality — who have requested records, basically saying, ‘We want them all.’”
As Police Chief Paige Burge told the News last week, processing a single hour of police camera footage — including redacting sensitive information such as driver’s license or Social Security numbers, as well as protecting victims of a given crime — can take “up to four hours.”
“And typically, the videos requested are longer in duration — more involved calls for [police] service,” Chief Burge said at Monday’s Council meeting.
Since 2023, when Yellow Springs police officers first began wearing body-worn cameras, 32 public record requests have been made for video footage. As the News reported last week, “nearly half” of those total requests were from individuals or media outlets from outside of Yellow Springs, according to Chief Burge.
Enacting the fees and how?
The four Council members present at Monday’s meeting — member Carmen Brown is currently on leave — generally seemed amenable to abiding by HB 315’s established fee schedule: charging video records requesters $75 per hour of footage produced, and capping charges at $750.
However, Council members and Village staff struggled to definitively answer some remaining questions. As Solicitor Blankenship mused at the outset of the discussion, how could the Village deal with multiple public records requests of the same video footage? Will all requesters be charged the same amount, or only the first requester?
The group was split on the matter.
Council President Kevin Stokes suggested that the “least invasive approach” was to have multiple, concurrent requesters all pay what he called “market rate.”
Conversely, Clerk of Council Kintner said that charging every requester the same amount veers into profiteering from fulfilling public records requests, which she noted Ohio law prohibits. In Kintner’s view, the $75 per hour of footage charge is the premium a potential news agency seeking a scoop ought to pay.
“If they want to be the first to get something on the air, then they’re going to pay,” Kintner said.
Council Vice President Gavin DeVore Leonard briefly suggested that concurrent requesters could potentially split the fee. Recalling the state requirement to charge requesters in advance of fulfilling the request, Kintner said that splitting the fee could breach the other state requirement to produce public records in a “timely” window.
Blankenship later added: “I don’t love the ‘first-in-line’ approach. From a fairness perspective, it doesn’t sit right.”
For now, the resolution — at least, as it was drafted for Monday’s meeting — states that a public records requester seeking police video footage “must pay the estimated cost before the Village begins the process of preparing the video records.”
The current language of the resolution exempts a number of parties from paying the video request fees:
• The victim of a crime where a police report had been filed;
• Immediate family members of the victim, including a parent or legal guardian of a juvenile victim;
• An attorney or individual with power of attorney representing a victim;
• A person requesting the video record on behalf of any governmental agency for “any lawful government purpose;”
• A person requesting the video record on behalf of any public or private school in Ohio.
Some Council members sought to add more exempted groups to the list ahead of the next Council meeting — specifically for Yellow Springs residents.
“There’s an argument to be made there,” Blankenship said. “Local residents are paying taxes to the municipality. They’re paying for the policing and the record. But if we’re talking about residents, then you’ll need to be able to prove residency.”
Blankenship noted that all public records requests can be made anonymously, which could hamper those individuals living within the 45387 zip code seeking at the same time to request a video public record, avoid any fee and protect their identity.
In the event that such a fee exemption is extended to Yellow Springs residents seeking police camera footage, then all full-time staff members of the News would likewise be exempt, and would not be required to pay the Village for any requested videos.
The next Village Council meeting will be 6 p.m., Monday, April 21, in the John Bryan Community Center.
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