A politician and former Miami administrator have joined effort to recall Joe Carollo
Former Miami-Dade County Commissioner Bruno Barreiro and former Miami City Manager Joe Arriola have joined an effort to recall Joe Carollo, adding some familiar political figures and money to a campaign to oust the commissioner.
The pair joined other organizers in front of Miami City Hall to publicly announce their support and denounce Carollo, a former mayor who was elected in 2017 after 16 years out of office.
Barreiro said Carollo was sowing chaos in City Hall instead of focusing on ground-level issues in the district.
“This district is in need of affordable housing, in need of maintenance of the streets, in need of public safety,” said Barreiro, who lives in Carollo’s district. Barreiro later told the Miami Herald he does not intend to run for the seat if the recall effort succeeds.
Arriola, who served as Miami’s city manager from 2003 to 2006, said he’s committed $100,000 to the effort and he’s pledged to donate as much as it takes.
“I’m proudly putting my money in,” he said.
Arriola currently serves as chairman of the Public Health Trust, the board that oversees the Jackson Health System. He stood on the opposite side of Carollo’s political universe when Arriola supported Mayor Francis Suarez’s effort to become a “strong mayor,” a campaign to make the mayor, instead of the city manager, the city’s top administrator and decision-maker. That effort failed at the ballot box.
Barreiro’s entry into the recall effort redraws old battle lines. His wife Zoraida ran against Carollo in 2017. She ran again in 2018 for the County Commission seat Barreiro left to run for Congress, and in that race, she faced Alex Diaz de la Portilla, one of Carollo’s friends and political allies.
Barreiro and Arriola join Juan Cuba, former chairman of the Miami-Dade Democratic Party, and Eleazar Meléndez, a former political opponent of Diaz de la Portilla, as leaders of the movement.
Carollo was dismissive of the effort when activists first unveiled the petition on Jan. 30, pointing out that Cuba and Meléndez do not live in the commissioner’s district. Arriola, who lives in Coral Gables, had a response when asked about his residency.
“Nobody had that argument when I came here to work for free,” Arriola said. When the businessman worked as Miami’s city manager, he donated his salary to charity. Arriola built his wealth as owner as operator of Avanti Press, a printing company he sold in 2001 for $42 million.
On Tuesday, Carollo emailed reporters a response to the press conference that tried to connect the recall drive with allegations against Rene Pedrosa, the mayor’s former spokesman who was arrested Friday and charged with groping a minor in City Hall and sending a sexually explicit photo to the teen.
“Now, this small group holds a press conference with the fairytale of a recall to divert attention from the gravity of the crimes committed against a minor in the Mayor’s conference room,” Carollo wrote.
Meléndez called Carollo’s response “outrageous.”
“Joe’s ridiculous attempt to disparage our grassroots effort is nothing more than a shameless lie by a cornered and wounded career politician,” he said.
The recall campaign’s organizers also announced they were amending paperwork founding a political committee called Take Back Our City that they filed with the city clerk on Jan. 30. The paperwork was changed to explicitly state the committee’s purpose is for the recall of Carollo, and to name a new treasurer.
The attorney working with the committee, J.C. Planas, said the petition will now begin “in earnest.” The committee’s goal is to collect 1,577 signatures to move forward.
“All the petitions have to be within a 30-day window,” Planas said.
A second round of signature gathering with a higher threshold would be necessary to trigger a recall election.
Planas is another person who’s faced off with Carollo in court. The attorney represented Alfonso “Alfie” Leon when Leon, a former political opponent of Carollo, tried to invalidate Carollo’s election and accused Carollo of failing to meet the city’s residency requirement. Carollo prevailed in court.
This story was originally published February 11, 2020 at 7:48 PM.
