By Brian Trompeter
Citing higher legal-overhead costs and more staff time needed to review police body-worn-camera video footage, Vienna Town Council members on July 10 unanimously agreed to spend 15 percent more on the town’s legal services.
“We’re fortunate to have [Town Attorney Steven Briglia’s] institutional knowledge, and he hasn’t raised his rates in a while,” said Finance Director Marion Serfass.
Briglia is not a town employee, but rather an official appointed by the Council who performs contracted legal services through his law firm, Briglia Hundley PC.
The new spending arrangement for fiscal year 2024 with the firm is worth $365,000, which includes $200,000 for legal services, $95,000 for prosecuting services and $70,000 for supplemental legal services.
The town’s budget for those purchased services was $246,286 in fiscal 2018, $243,417 in fiscal 2019, $274,110 in fiscal 2020, $270,640 in fiscal 2021, $284,706 in fiscal 2022 and $319,510 (later bumped up to $321,010) in fiscal 2023.
The firm’s prosecution budget jumped 29.1 percent in fiscal 2024 largely because of the amount of time needed for state-mandated reviews of police videos from in-cruiser and body-worn cameras, town officials said.
Vienna police received their body-worn cameras last November and cases involving videos from them began hitting the courts in January and February, Briglia said.
“Now we have to review the body-cams and produce them for part of discovery,” he said.
Billing time for such activities “jumped significantly” – an additional 20 hours – in February and March for cases that occurred over the winter holidays, Briglia said. The number of additional hours has dipped since, and Briglia promised to supply the Council with statistics this fall.
Vienna is among many Virginia jurisdictions experiencing higher legal fees to review police videos, but footage from the body-worn cameras is proving valuable, Briglia said.
“They help us,” he said of the cameras. “To be honest with you, we don’t lose cases because of body-cams, but you have to produce and you have review it.”
Police in-cruiser videos are comparatively easier to review, but body-worn cameras are on for longer periods and sometimes capture people’s personal information, such as from driver’s licenses, which then must be redacted, Briglia said.
Vienna’s legal fees are “still the lowest in the region,” Briglia said. The city of Falls Church, which has a smaller population than Vienna’s, pays the Arlington County Commonwealth’s Attorney’s Office and courts $527,000 to perform its prosecutions, he said.
“We’re efficient” in Vienna, Briglia said. “We’re not trying to do things we don’t need to do. But the body-cam is a big change.”
