Yelm to review fee schedules for city parks, photo and electronic copies

During a Yelm City Council study session on Tuesday, April 7, Kathy Linnemeyer, Yelm city clerk, and Line Roy, Yelm communications and recreations coordinator, highlighted several changes coming to the city’s fee schedule in relation to local parks, and photo or electronic copies.

According to Linnemeyer, the City of Yelm will add new fees to its fee schedule to include photo copies and electronic copies they provide — often through public records requests. She noted this is mostly in response to these requests being filed.

“The fees are very minimal,” Linnemeyer said. “We’re just adopting what we can, legally, by RCW. Basically, if someone wants to come in, inspect records or look at them, they can still do that, of course, for no charge.”

She specified that if someone were to visit her counter, asking to look at something “easy and readily available,” they’d be allowed to do that right away.

Linnemeyer added that if someone requested to look at an item that “requires time to put together,” then they’d want to schedule an appointment to do so.

According to Linnemeyer, if photocopies are made of records, the cost will come at 15-cents per page. If a patron needs something scanned and placed into an electronic format, it will cost 10-cents per page. Electronic files and attachments that can be attached to an email, cloud, storage device or any means of electronic delivery can be charged 5-cents for every four electronic files included.

“As you can see, it’s very minimal, but it will help reduce some of the bot requests that come in a lot,” she said. “They’d still have to pay that fee. It is very minimal. Also, they can be charged 10 cents per every gigabyte of data that we upload to those.”

Linnemeyer added that these proposed changes will be brought forward to Yelm City Councilors later in April.

Mayor Joe DePinto emphasized that the introduction of these fees aren’t to dissuade residents from submitting public records requests. Linnemeyer noted that some cities charge more than Yelm potentially will.

“There are some cities that charge more, and you can charge more, but in order to charge more you would have to do an actual cost analysis and literally you’re taking a stopwatch and timing the exact time to scan it, to go to the copier and scan it,” Linnemeyer said. “It’s pretty time consuming. It would take a lot of time to get enough data to justify that.”

Additionally, Linnemeyer said another item the city is considering adding is a customized access fee.

“What that means is we’d have to go out and buy a new program to put these records together or provide them in a way that we would charge that fee to the requester to do. That’s also part of the RCW,” she said. “If we have to hire an outside vendor, maybe there’s some old takes somewhere that have to be converted. If we have to hire an outside vendor, we would just pass along the actual vendor cost to the requester.”

Roy, who followed Linnemeyer’s comments about fee changes to photo and electronic copies, discussed park fees and potential changes. She stated she wants to make sure Yelm is keeping up with costs incurred for staffing and cleanup throughout different community events at parks.

“We just want to make sure that we’re aligned with our operation costs, our community needs and our long-term sustainability,” Roy said. “Cody (Colt’s) team has worked incredibly hard to get our parks up to the beautiful standard they are now. We want to make sure that we are maintaining that.”

Roy stated that there’s currently a “really low cost” usage fee for events at local parks.

“For Yelm City Park, which is the only park we’re going to be talking about today, it’s a one-day event or a two-day event,” Roy said. “One-day events are, at the most, $1,950. Two-day events, at most, are $3,400. Most of that is going to stay really similar to the new fee structure that’ll be proposed.”

Right now, Roy said, each of the parks are available for rent at a flat rate, regardless of the event’s size or type.

“You can imagine that there’s a big difference in staffing needs from a 2,000-person event to a 10,000-person event,” Roy said. “What you’ll see is we’ve tiered it out for one day events, two day events, at up to 2,500 people, 5,000 people, 10,000 people and then 10,000-plus. They each have a base rate that corresponds to a designated space on the map. There are some additional costs that you would incur.”

According to Roy, an example of an event on the “small side” would be one day with less than 2,500 people. This scale of event would draw a charge of $400. If it added a beer garden, the addition itself would cost $500 to cover police staffing.

“Our officers will go more often if there’s a beer garden, just to keep everyone safe. You can imagine that is a pretty high expense,” Roy said.

She added that a two-day event using the parking lot would cost $750, and then an additional $500 if it included a beer garden. She reiterated these costs are to offset the city’s full cost of employees maintaining the parks.

Councilor Brian Hess asked Roy if a local resident were to inquire about renting out the park, would they get a discount? She answered that it’s currently the same cost.

“I don’t have anybody currently that has put in requests for park usage that are outside of our community,” Roy said.