Andreatta: Dinolfo shelved gun opt-out forms

Law-abiding gun owners have always had a healthy mistrust of the government's ability to protect their rights. What's in Room 101H of the Monroe County Clerk's Office should give them — and everyone else — even more pause.

There, stuffed in seven drawers of a black metal filing cabinet, are the unprocessed "opt-out forms" of some 20,000 pistol permit holders who sought to shield their names and addresses from public disclosure under the state's SAFE Act.

Most of them date back three years to when the law was new and when Cheryl Dinolfo, like other county clerks, was deluged with these forms and called on Albany to pay for the cost of processing them.

That involved clerks sending the forms to a judge for approval and then noting which permit holders had been granted privacy, which was virtually anyone who asked for it.

To make her point, Dinolfo invited reporters to film her beside a stack of forms standing several feet tall on her desk. It was a startling visual, as was her invitation to keep the forms coming.

"In order to keep your private information private …" she said, "we are encouraging people to come in, fill out the opt-out form, and we will be processing those through the courts and then back here at the County Clerk's Office."

Albany ignored calls to pay for processing the forms and left the clerks and their staff to muddle through on their own. So they did.

Except in Monroe County, where they mostly threw up their hands and stashed the forms out of sight and out of mind in that filing cabinet in Room 101H.

Most of the forms never crossed a judge's desk and those that did were never matched to their permits. They sit in drawers in what appears to be chronological order, making it impossible for county clerk staff to know whether a specific permit holder requested privacy without painstakingly thumbing through thousands of forms.

"No matter where you are in terms of whether you think pistol permits should be public records or not, this is a troubling situation," said County Clerk Adam Bello, who assumed the office in March after Dinolfo was elected county executive.

Bello revealed Room 101H in response to a recent inquiry I made about the status of a pistol permit for Robert Wiesner, who was convicted earlier this year of felony bid-rigging on a $212 million county project while his wife, Maggie Brooks, was county executive.

State penal law bars felons from having handgun permits. Several readers had written me wanting to know whether Wiesner, an ex-cop, had his permit revoked or whether he had gotten off as easy as he did for his crime, which cost him $8,000 in fines and forfeitures.

Bello wouldn't say, and explained that he wouldn't provide any public information on any permit holder because the records he inherited were such a mess that there's no telling which permit holders had opted out.

Someone's rights were going to get trampled, I guess, and it might as well have been a journalist and his right to know rather than a felon who may have wanted information about his handgun kept confidential.

After all, it was journalists who prompted the opt-out provision in the SAFE Act in the first place.

The opt-out was added after The Journal News, a Gannett newspaper in Westchester County, sparked national outrage by publishing the names and addresses and a map of permit holders in its readership area following the Connecticut school shootings in 2012.

There are lots of reasons one might want to know whether an individual owns a handgun. But even some news organizations cringed at the extent to which The Journal News exercised its right to know.

Before then, the names and addresses of pistol permit holders were public information and had been since the state's highest court determined so in 1981.

In Monroe County, they were available on the county clerk's website until Dinolfo disabled that function in 2013 to give permit holders time to file opt-out forms. She never restored it and at one point that spring said she couldn’t foresee ever making permit holders' names public again.

Dinolfo declined to be interviewed, but sent a written statement saying her office had planned to file the forms in such a way that would denote which permit holders were granted confidentiality after all of the forms were approved by judges. By that logic, the process would never end because forms are trickling in to this day.

She added that she hadn't released any permit holders' information since the enactment of the SAFE Act "to protect the safety and security of all pistol permit holders." That suggests that even attempting to provide public access to pistol permit information was never a priority. She took the law into her own hands.

"My role as county executive is to protect all residents of Monroe County," Dinolfo said. "I did the same serving as county clerk by standing up for what I thought was right and following the law."

Like Dinolfo, many gun enthusiasts reject the notion that permit information ought to be public. Ken Mathison, a spokesman for the Monroe County branch of the Shooters Committee on Political Education, a gun rights group, is one of them. That's why he opted out.

But even Mathison acknowledged that the law provides for public disclosure. He called the backlog "gross incompetence" and worried that the county would lose a legal challenge.

The result, he said, would leave the county either scrambling to correct itself or divulging permit information that should have been private in its haste to answer a court order.

"I think it's presumptuous on (Dinolfo's) part to think she'd get away with this," Mathison said. "I think she passed a can of worms on to (Bello)."

No one's going to court over Robert Wiesner's pistol permit. But if someone did, they'd win.

Bello said his office is attempting to expedite processing the opt-out forms and has requested an additional $25,000 from the County Legislature to hire two part-time employees. Dinolfo calculated the cost of processing to be $16.10 per form, which works out to $322,000 for 20,000 forms.

About 7,200 of the 20,000 forms have been approved by a judge, but were never matched to a permit on file, Bello said. He added that most of the approvals were granted in 2013, and that only a few hundred forms appear to have been sent to judges in the ensuing years. Dinolfo said she sent forms as quickly as the courts could take them.

Bello anticipated that playing catch-up would take two years.

That's an astonishingly long time considering most large counties claimed to have complied with the law or met the spirit of the law years ago.

"We fought our way through it," recalled Tim Idoni, the clerk of Westchester County, where upward of 14,500 opt-out forms were filed. "We were inundated, but we knew once we got through it we were done. It took maybe two and a half months."

Representatives of pistol permit offices in Onondaga and Albany counties said their backlogs were cleared years ago, and a deputy clerk in Erie County said it is still processing the nearly 30,000 forms it received but was updating its pistol permit list as it went.

Niagara County Clerk Joseph Jastrzemski said his office is still sending its more than 20,000 forms to judges. He noted, though, that the forms awaiting approval are filed alphabetically to make cross-referencing them with their corresponding permits easier when answering public inquiries.

That's all that needs to be done in Room 101H to make things right for everyone.

David Andreatta is a Democrat and Chronicle columnist. He can be reached at dandreatta@gannett.com.