Chula Vista Ordered to Pay $500K in Legal Fees After Losing Landmark Police Drone Transparency Case

A San Diego judge has ordered the City of Chula Vista to pay over $500,000 in legal fees after losing a groundbreaking four-year legal battle over public access to police drone videos, delivering a costly lesson in transparency that could reshape how law enforcement agencies nationwide handle drone footage requests.

Superior Court Judge Katherine Bacal awarded attorney Cory Briggs $499,114 on October 9th for successfully representing La Prensa San Diego publisher Arturo Castañares in a lawsuit that established new statewide precedent requiring California police departments to review drone videos case-by-case rather than withholding them under blanket exemptions.

Historic Legal Battle Ends With Expensive Precedent

The case began in May 2021 when Castañares requested copies of Chula Vista Police Department drone videos from March 2021—just one month of footage from what was then the nation’s first FAA-authorized drone-as-first-responder program. The city’s response? A categorical denial claiming all drone footage qualified as “investigative records” exempt from California’s Public Records Act.

That blanket refusal triggered years of costly litigation that bounced between trial courts, the California Court of Appeals, and twice to the state Supreme Court. In December 2023, the Appeals Court published a landmark ruling rejecting Chula Vista’s position, establishing that police must evaluate each video individually rather than hiding behind categorical exemptions.

The California Supreme Court denied the city’s appeals in April 2024 and again on August 14, 2025, finally ending the legal battle. Judge Timothy Taylor subsequently ordered the release of 25 videos from March 2021, finding many showed routine calls with no legitimate reason for withholding—including a reported car fire where no vehicle was found and a freeway collision search that turned up nothing.

The $500K Price Tag for Fighting Transparency

Judge Bacal’s October ruling awarded Briggs $332,638.75 in legal fees plus $156.20 in court costs. But the real sting came from her decision to apply a 1.5x “Lodestar multiplier“—a legal mechanism that increases fee awards for complex cases taken on contingency. That multiplier brought the total award to $498,958, plus costs, for a final bill of $499,114.20.

The multiplier reflects several factors that made this case extraordinary. Briggs accepted the case on contingency, putting his firm at financial risk for four years with no guarantee of payment. The case also broke new legal ground—the Appeals Court called it “a matter of first impression” that required “granular review and categorization of law enforcement records.”

California law also adds 7% annual interest on legal fee awards, meaning the bill has been growing by roughly $96 per day since Judge Taylor’s May 16, 2025 ruling. As of today, Chula Vista owes an additional $15,200 in interest.

The city’s own legal defense consumed at least $400,000 through December 2023, according to statements by city officials. Combined with the court-ordered payment to Briggs, Chula Vista taxpayers are on the hook for well over $1 million—all to keep 25 routine drone videos from public view.

What the Released Videos Actually Show

The videos Judge Taylor ordered released expose just how routine—and non-investigative—many drone deployments really are. One March 8, 2021 video described as a “car fire” call shows the drone finding nothing in the area and returning to base. The video log notes the reporting party “did not know the location of the car fire and was reporting the information second-hand.”

Another March 28, 2021 video labeled “No detail collision” shows the drone scanning State Route 54 at the Chula Vista-National City border, searching for a reported Jeep that had gone off the roadway. The log states: “The Uncrewed Aerial System checked the area, but there was nothing matching in the area.”

None of the 25 released videos tied to actual criminal investigations—yet the city fought for four years and spent over $1 million arguing they should remain secret.

City’s Arguments Rejected at Every Level

Chula Vista mounted an aggressive legal defense, arguing the case wasn’t legally challenging and that Briggs shouldn’t receive enhanced fees. Judge Bacal rejected both arguments decisively.

The city claimed “there was no declaratory relief” because the Appeals Court ruling didn’t directly order video release. Bacal dismissed this as inaccurate, noting that Judge Taylor’s subsequent order releasing 25 videos provided exactly the declaratory relief Castañares sought.

Chula Vista also argued the case was “not legally challenging” to minimize the fee award. Bacal found this argument absurd given the city’s own prior statements. In its petition to the California Supreme Court, Chula Vista’s lawyers wrote that the case was “unlike any opinion before it” and that “no precedent imposes such a standard” on police surveillance systems like body cameras, dash cams, or automated license plate readers.

The judge noted the case involved “novel and complex issues” that produced a published Appeals Court opinion on “a matter of first impression,” justifying the 1.5x multiplier.

Statewide Implications for Police Drone Programs

The legal precedent—formally cited as Castañares v Superior Ct 98 Cal.App.5th 295, 316—now governs how California’s 1,500+ police departments handle drone footage requests. The ruling requires agencies to categorize videos into three groups: those tied to actual investigatory files (exempt), those related to investigating whether a law was broken but not part of a file (exempt), and factual inquiries with no investigative component (potentially releasable after judicial review).

Law enforcement organizations fought hard against this outcome. The Los Angeles County Police Chiefs’ Association submitted a brief arguing the ruling would “discourage law enforcement from using technology” due to the “person-hours now added to retrieving, reviewing, and redacting such files.”

More ominously, that same brief admitted for the first time that drone video “can be integrated with other sources, such as public safety camera or satellite feeds and [automated license plate readers], and enhanced by analytical technologies, such as facial recognition software and other AI.”

That acknowledgment of integrated surveillance networks—exactly what privacy advocates feared—only strengthened Castañares’ argument for transparency.

DroneXL’s Take

This case represents a watershed moment for the drone industry, and not just in California. As we’ve covered extensively at DroneXL, Chula Vista pioneered the drone-as-first-responder model that’s now spreading nationwide. The city’s program—the first to receive FAA approval for beyond-visual-line-of-sight flights in 2018—has flown nearly 20,000 missions with a fleet of 32 drones.

But our previous reporting has also revealed troubling patterns. A WIRED investigation found Chula Vista’s drones disproportionately surveilled low-income, largely immigrant neighborhoods on the west side. Each flight passes over an average of 13 census blocks, potentially exposing 4,700 residents to aerial surveillance. Perhaps most concerning: 10% of flights lacked any stated purpose and couldn’t be linked to 911 calls, and only 21 flights out of thousands led to actual arrests.

The $500,000 penalty sends a clear message to the drone industry: transparency isn’t optional, and fighting accountability is expensive. For police departments deploying drones, this case proves that robust privacy policies and clear data retention rules aren’t just good public relations—they’re financial survival. For drone manufacturers and integrators, it’s a reminder that how your technology is used matters as much as what it can do.

The revolving door between Chula Vista’s police department and the commercial drone sector adds another layer. Former CVPD Captain William “Fritz” Reber, who architected the drone program, worked at Skydio for nearly five years. When police officials become drone industry executives, the incentive to expand surveillance programs without accountability becomes uncomfortably clear.

The broader question remains: Can police drone programs balance genuine public safety benefits with constitutional privacy protections? This case doesn’t answer that definitively, but it establishes that sunlight is the best disinfectant. When police resist transparency this aggressively—spending over $1 million to hide routine videos of empty parking lots and nonexistent car fires—it erodes public trust far more than any released footage ever could.

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