The California Supreme Court has declined to take up the latest appeal by the city of Chula Vista over the long-running litigation over the public release of drone video collected by police.

All that’s left to litigate is how much the city will pay the plaintiff’s lawyers.

The determination by the state’s highest court all but puts to rest a lawsuit filed four years ago by Arturo Castañares, the La Prensa San Diego publisher who sought access to Chula Vista police drone images under the California Public Records Act.

Castañares called the decision a win for public transparency.

“It’s a shame that the city and police chief chose to spend four years and over $1 million in legal fees for appeals simply to keep the public from accessing some of these videos instead of just showing how they use this technology,” he said.

“The legal precedent set in this case now gives the public and media more access to documents — not just drone videos — that police have shielded from disclosure by broadly categorizing them as investigative when they’re clearly not,” Castañares added.

Chula Vista officials said the legal fight was not one they welcomed, but they were trying to protect the privacy rights of everyday citizens.

“The outcome of the lawsuit substantially reduced the amount of video the city must disclose, thereby striking a better balance of the cost and burden to the city while protecting the privacy of its residents,” spokesperson Mirella Leung Lopez said in a statement.

“Had the city agreed to disclose all records requested, the city would likely have exhausted a significant amount of resources redacting video that it was not obligated to disclose,” she added.

The city declined to comment on the legal fees due to Castañares’ lawyer, San Diego litigator Cory Briggs, because the parties are still litigating the final fees. Briggs previously estimated his legal fees in the case at well over $500,000.

The outcome of the legal dispute is significant for other California law enforcement agencies going forward.

Since the Chula Vista Police Department launched its drone program, a host of other police and sheriff’s departments across the state have followed suit. Chula Vista’s appeal was broadly watched across the law enforcement community.

The legal dispute began in early 2021, after the Chula Vista Police Department became one of the first local law enforcement agencies in the nation to begin sending drones to the scenes of accidents and other emergency calls.

Castañares requested copies of police drone video collected through the month of March 2021, but city officials insisted all of the footage was exempted from the Public Records Act as investigative material.

He then filed a lawsuit challenging the city’s position that all of the video was part of ongoing investigations and therefore subject to withholding.

A Superior Court judge agreed with Chula Vista, but Castañares prevailed on appeal.

The city tried to take the appellate court decision to the state Supreme Court, but the high court did not accept the case.

The case was subsequently returned to the trial court for clarification about which specific videos were subject to public disclosure and which could be withheld.

Earlier this year, the trial court judge ordered the release of dozens of the videos that Chula Vista withheld from public release in 2021.

“The public interest served by withholding the records clearly does not outweigh the public interest served by disclosure,” stated the 18-page ruling by Judge Timothy Taylor, who singled out 25 separate videos for public release.

The detailed order offered the first public view into the kinds of cases the Chula Vista Police Department was dispatching drones to — and the first public descriptions of the images they have been recording.

According to the ruling from Judge Taylor, many of the videos showed routine events with no apparent reason to withhold them from public inspection.

For example, one drone sent to the scene of an elderly man who fell was withheld on the basis of privacy. But the judge said the actual video showed an overview of the San Diego Country Club and other landmarks while the victim was visible only under an awning.

“There is no possible privacy violation implicated, as only the subject’s legs can be visualized,” the judge wrote.

The initial records request filed by Castañares included hundreds of separate videos recorded in March 2021. The judge examined a sample of 44 separate images and eventually ordered that 25 of those be released under state law.

Open-government experts cheered the court victory.

“You cannot just categorically deny disclosure,” David Loy, the legal director of the First Amendment Coalition advocacy group, told The San Diego Union-Tribune earlier this year. “Not every drone video is made for the purpose of investigating crime.”

But the Chula Vista City Council nonetheless voted to appeal that decision to the state Supreme Court. That is the appeal the high court most recently declined to consider.

Earlier this month, in the wake of the Supreme Court decision, Chula Vista began the process of releasing some of the videos, according to a YouTube post by La Prensa San Diego earlier this week.

Police officials, meanwhile, have created an online dashboard that provides residents and any interested parties information about drone deployments, including the dates, times, lengths and direction of flights.