Transparency bites

Suffolk County Register of Probate Felix Arroyo has for weeks been getting up on his soap box and demanding transparency from court officials who suspended him pending an investigation into his handling of registry business.

You know that old saying about “be careful what you wish for ... ”

Arroyo’s weapons of choice are email blasts (What no Twitter account?) sent out to presumed supporters even as he solicits money for his legal defense fund and attempts to smear Court Administrator Harry Spence and the retired probate judge appointed to investigate dealings at the registry, Anthony Nesi.

His first line of defense was to call on the court system to make its allegations of possible wrongdoing in registry operations “transparent.” Well fine, said a spokeswoman for the court system, pointing out that Arroyo was sent a series of supporting documents on Feb. 24 explaining the reasoning behind his suspension and that he was certainly free to release them.

But since Arroyo hadn’t done that, despite repeated promises to supporters that such a disclosure would come “very soon,” the court finally released its 53page assessment of the registry under Arroyo’s tenure. Oh, and it’s a stunner. It documents how more than $200,000 in checks made out to the courts were left unprocessed, scattered about the desks of various employees. Fifty bins of legal case files, some dating back to February of last year, were also not docketed or scanned into the system — but also scattered around the office. Another 60 bins of case files were stacked waiting to be filed. These are, let’s not forget, sensitive matters like divorce cases, child custody matters and adoptions.

Meanwhile regular customer wait time for service had risen to two hours.

Of course, any appointed official would have been out — long ago. But because this obscure but critical post remains an elected one (and that’s the real problem here), Spence needed to build a case for Arroyo’s removal for cause. Retired probate judge Anthony Nesi got that assignment and will report back to Spence and the chief justice of the trial court.

Meanwhile Arroyo, who was elected to the post in 2014, has released his own 12-page defense and insisted career employees were out to “sabotage” him for reasons “grounded in racism and unwarranted hostility ... ”