It took a lawsuit against him for abusing his power, but Miami Commissioner Joe Carollo was finally stripped of his post as chairman of the Bayfront Park Management Trust, which he has been leading for almost eight years. This comes a month after a whistleblower lawsuit from two former employees who say that Carollo used the Trust as his own personal slush fund.
Commissioners voted 3-2 Thursday — only Chairwoman Christine King sided with Crazy Joe — to remove Carollo as chair. They also replaced him with Commissioner Miguel Gabela, who led the effort to oust him.
“I know you’ve done some good things in the park,” Gabela had told Carollo. “But things have gotten out of hand.”
Carollo and the city were sued last month by former Trust Executive Director Jose Suarez and former Finance Director Jose Canto, who say they were forced to resign after they reported shoddy accounting practices that allowed Carollo to giveaway contracts to his friends and get kickbacks from them. They also said that Carollo used the funds raised by the agency, which oversees both Bayfront and Maurice Ferre parks, to fund his own office events and promote his political profile.
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While King said that the commission had already scheduled new board chair appointments for the March meeting, and she didn’t mind waiting, Gabela said the recent news gave the removal a sense of urgency. Commissioner Manolo Reyes agreed.
“It’s about time we stop it, so we don’t get any more black eyes,” Reyes said.
Despite having promised last year to step down in January, Carollo defended his stewardship and called a visibly uncomfortable Chief Financial Officer and Assistant City Manager Larry Spring to the podium help him justify himself, pointing to annual audits and emails that show Commissioner Damian Pardo had also asked questions about the Trust’s funding. Wow. The commissioner in the district of the two parks that the Trust oversees — Bayfront Park and Maurice Ferre Park — dared to asked questions about operations and expenditures? You gotta be kidding.
They should all have been asking questions.
Of course, Carollo used his mic to attack everyone else.
“One of the worst things in life is to be so successful at something, they kill you for it,” he said, WHAT, saying the ouster was motivated by “envy.” No, it was motivated by good common sense.
He reserved his most pointed remarks for Gabela, again, hinting that the District 1 commissioner had made a mistake going after”a guy who was really your biggest supporter here for Allapattah.”
King asked for the commissioner to keep his comments short and non-confrontational. “You want to have a kangaroo court,” he shouted at her and demanded to have his say “if I’m going to be thrown in the dirt by so-called colleagues.”
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Carollo said he had every intention of stepping down in January and it’s why he rushed to finish the Bayfront fountain project.”It wa you who was here and Mr. Pardo by Zoom who voted to bring all the boards to the March 13 meeting,” he told Gabela
At that point, King was so frustrated that she called for a pee-pee break. “You know what? I have to go to the bathroom,” she said. “This meeting is in recess.”
But when she came back, it did not get better.
Carollo continued with the emails he said showed that Pardo’s office wanted a formal investigation into the inventory, and specifically the controlled substances, in a veterinarian trailer that the Trust had overpaid for by tens of thousands of dollars. “This is all behind the city manager’s back, going direct to police.
“Mr. Pardo abused his power. Mr. Pardo abused his office… by going directly to the police chief and falsely claim he had anonymous complaints and people coming up to him at meetings.
“Mr. Gabela went to the radio, the Miami Herald, to put my face in the dirt, to try to humiliate me,” Carollo said, tone deaf to the fact that he doesn’t need anybody to humiliate him since he does such a good job himself.
Carollo said that his enemies, the Little Havana businessmen who won a federal First Amendment lawsuit against him and former State Rep. Manuel “Manny” Prieguez, who the commissioner pointed to in the audience — who was laughing out loud — were behind the effort to oust him. He said Prieguez represents a company that wants to put events on at Bayfront Park.
“His handlers got a hold of him right away and told him what to do,” Carollo said about Gabela.
Gabela shot back: “The only person that handles me is my wife.”
Read related: Joe Carollo wants to abolish Miami’s Bayfront Park Management Trust
He called the question three or four times before they actually voted because Carollo went on and on about the war against him.
Gabela has been trying to remove Carollo from the Trust since at least last June. Guess he needed the controversy of a whistleblower lawsuit alleging mismanagement of funds to get it done.
“You’re problem is you’re like Maduro,” Gabela said, comparing Carollo to the Venezuelan dictator. “You don’t want to leave.”
In the end, Carollo said he did not have time for the Bayfront Trust and wanted to give it up — just not to Gabela, who he said wanted the chairmanship “for all the wrong reasons.”
In related news, there was no appetite, as Commissioner Carollo noted, to abolish the Bayfront Trust and, before the chairmanship vote, he voted along with the rest of the commission to unanimously reject the his own measure.
He should have given the chairmanship up then.
Miami Commissioner Joe Carollo loses Bayfront Park Trust to Miguel Gabela added by Ladra on
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