Jacob Dimond / jake@yelmonline.com
After some deliberation during a Yelm City Council meeting on Tuesday, June 9, councilors unanimously voted to approve changes to the city’s fee schedule — with an amendment to waive all charges for records requests under $2.
The proposed changes to the fee schedule add fees for providing photocopies and electronic records, as allowed per RCW 42.56.120. The changes also add fees for Yelm City Park community events. These updates were presented to Yelm City Council for review and consideration during a study session meeting on Tuesday, April 7.
The proposed park fees reflect the rising costs of maintenance, staffing and facility improvements that are associated with hosting events for the community.
The current park rental fees do not account for the increased impact that larger events have at the facilities, including the greater demand for maintenance, parking for staffing and clean up efforts. The proposed updates introduce “a more equitable, tiered” fee structure that aligns costs with event size and usage totals.
According to Kathy Linnemeyer, Yelm City Clerk, she intended to bring this resolution to Yelm City Council sooner — but more work was done “behind the scenes” and pushed this item out until June.
“The only update that’s different from when you saw it last is previously there was a clause on here that we wouldn’t charge any fees under $2,” Linnemeyer said. “That’s how it was presented to you prior. That’s been removed so that we would charge all fees.”
Councilor Tracey Wood asked Linnemeyer what the factors were to remove the waiver in the situation.
Before she answered, Mayor Joe DePinto said Yelm doesn’t want to make it more difficult to gain access to information, especially body-camera footage.
“What we are trying to do is prevent professional folks who are doing these big, huge requests from making those huge requests without any recourse,” DePinto said. “So, basically, we’re asking for a deposit, if I remember this correctly.”
According to Linnemeyer, the initial proposed change would charge any requestor of information — regardless of the amount. She noted the current proposed charges when uploading electronic files allows Yelm to charge for every four files that are uploaded.
“In addition to that, we can charge 10-cents per gigabyte,” Linnemeyer said. “So if a request had four documents and those documents equaled 10 gigabytes, then that request would be charged 15 cents.”
DePinto reiterated that the introduction of new schedule fee updates aren’t to weed out small requests, but rather to address large requests that demand time, labor and staffing.
“It’s one of these (requests) where we have to have IT go in and look for it,” DePinto said. “They have to spend a considerable amount of time, labor, working on this project. That’s what the increase of cost is mainly about, is staff time involved with those.”
DePinto asked Linnemeyer if there were any requests from city staffing or the police department to feature fees specifically under $2. She told the mayor that it would be a benefit to Yelm Police Department staffing to have a minimum threshold of a dollar or $2 because most requests will fall under that and “most people would not pay.”
“If a person requests records that are police records specifically, they don’t take payments over there,” Linnemeyer said. “If they request records, they would have to reach out to the person, let them know ‘this is how much your request is going to be.’ That person would call here, make a credit card payment over the phone or come here and pay cash if they wanted to do it that way. The person would take the payment. If it’s a credit card payment, the person at the counter has to manually enter that into our software system because those payments don’t upload automatically.”
She did specify that if council wanted to approve a resolution with a minimum threshold where they wouldn’t charge, it would only take a motion with an amendment to waive fees under a certain dollar amount.
“It would save staff time,” Linnemeyer said. “The police department has had well over 300 requests that they filled already this year. The majority of those requests are very minor. The intent of the fees is not to make money or recover money here, but to allow us, in most cases for when there’s a really large request, that we could charge a deposit up front before we even start working on it.”
Kangiser motioned to approve the resolution with an amendment to waive fees under $2 — and Yelm City Council unanimously approved the resolution.
