alt Hacker NewsService fees is the counter-tactic here.
If it takes the city clerk multiple hours to assemble and distribute the video clips and time gets billed to $1k/request because it's being done in the most inefficient, asinine way, well, how many FOIA requests really have $1k of urgency behind them?
I don't know enough about municipal billing to know how defensible that is, but it's definitely one of the escalation paths here.
Replies
This gets shot down PDQ. A significant case of this was a County charging $0.50/page for a title company requesting a CD of all their records (note: they're digital) going back a large length of time. The judge over the lawsuit ruled they could only charge costs (note, this isn't wishy washy 'going rate'- they have to expose salaries and actual times and the employees involved can be asked directly, under oath) which amounted to $100/per CD/DVD.
Kind of a teeth grinding win though, because title companies are absolute scum.
I'm reminded of the case of a recorder's office in Ohio charging $2 per page for copies of public documents. NYTimes made a funny dramatization of a transcript from that case, pretty good.
What Is a Photocopier?
Not very defensible. Wherever you are, this is probably fairly settled law. In Illinois, playing games with fees for non-commercial requests is likely to land you in a suit with fee recovery for the plaintiff and thus good legal representation on contingency.