The two candidates for Monroe County Clerk met in a debate Monday night broadcast live from the WXXI studios.
It was part of the Voice of the Voter initiative which also includes the Democrat & Chronicle, 13WHAM-TV and WDKX Radio.
During the hour-long debate Adam Bello and Cheryl Rozzi sparred on issues like the fees collected by the DMV, and how the situation with passport fees waived by the former county clerk was handled.
Bello, a Democrat, was appointed to the clerk's position earlier this year after Republican Cheryl Dinolfo was elected county executive. Rozzi, the Republican candidate, is currently the Greece town clerk.
She criticized Bello's efforts at creating a task force to deal with vacant and abandoned properties.
“We don’t need another level of bureaucracy. Each locality has different concerns which is why the issue is best addressed by the individual municipality rather than a countywide approach.”
But Bello says his efforts are just making use of resources already here and are not a burden on the taxpayer.
“There’s no extra layer of government here, what we’re doing is coordinating all the efforts so we’re coordinating efforts that are being done between the nonprofit community, this is what makes our task force unique.”
Rozzi said she thought Bello's office should have tried to get the improperly waived fees back to the county in a more prompt fashion.
In terms of the controversy about some passport fees that were waived when Dinolfo was county clerk, Rozzi took Bello to task over how quickly he tried to reach out to people who improperly were granted the waivers.
“If protecting taxpayers has been the priority then the goal of recouping the fees should have been, bar none, the number one first immediate response. In the interest of customer service I would have sent out invoices immediately and not waited a month.”
Bello says he did act quickly to deal with the situation.
“We had produced letters and invoices and sent those to the individuals that owed the fee. I was very clear from the beginning when I first spoke about this issue that we were going to work with the county attorney’s office and whoever are our other partners in government to make sure we can send those out and recoup those funds because recouping the funds on behalf of taxpayers was our absolute number one priority.”'
Bell says he would like to release the names of people who improperly saw the passport fees waived, but says he learned this week from the U.S. State Department that he can't go and do that right now.
Rozzi says if elected she would push for the county to keep a larger percentage of DMV fees, some of which now go to state government.
“That would be phenomenal to keep that money local and not ship it off to Albany. The county clerk should be advocating to keep a greater share of that money here and I would have thought that the current county clerk would have taken a greater interest in this issue.”
Bello says he would take a broader approach.
“I don’t think governments are supposed to compete with each other, and by going to the government asking for a higher percentage of the fees and having that argument, I think that sets up a very bad precedent where we’re competing with other levels of government for your business. At the end of the day we’re all supposed to be working together, not competing with each other for revenue , because at the end of the day, what’s the revenue, it’s your money.”
The two candidates also both say they are just focused on the county clerk race and are not looking to use it as a springboard to higher office.
