Joe Carollo-sponsored outdoor gym referendum will stay on Miami ballot, judge rules
A controversial Miami ballot question about the installation of Joe Carollo-sponsored gym equipment in one of the city’s downtown parks will remain on the ballot, and the votes will be tabulated and released as usual, according to a new ruling.
On Thursday, Miami-Dade Circuit Court Judge Jose Rodriguez denied a motion for a temporary injunction to invalidate the referendum, which asks voters if already-installed gym equipment in Maurice A. Ferré Park should remain.
Rodriguez’s order landed three days after a half-dozen residents sued the city over what they called a “misleading” ballot question that they said omits key information like the fact that the city’s Planning, Zoning and Appeals Board had reversed the city’s approval of the outdoor gym, determining that it did not adhere to proper permitting and design procedure.
The residents had sought to invalidate the ballot question by barring officials from tabulating and releasing the results.
READ MORE: Should Joe Carollo-sponsored gym equipment stay in Ferré Park? Miami voters will decide
But Michael Valdes, an attorney for the county Elections Department, said during a Wednesday hearing that with early voting and vote-by-mail already underway, it’s too late to stop the tabulation of results.
“It’s not as simple as just turning a switch on or off with this particular equipment,” he said.
“The machines have already been programmed,” Valdes continued, “and we cannot reprogram the machines without doing significant potential harm to all of the other races on the ballot. ... We’d have to re-code the entire election.”
Eric Eves, an attorney for the city, also emphasized the timing issue.
“They sat on this case for months,” Eves said at the hearing. “This ballot question was approved in May, and here we are in August, less than a week before Election Day.”
Rodriguez noted in his order that it has now been over three months since the commission agreed to send the ballot question to voters.
Under Carollo’s chairmanship, a semi-autonomous city agency called the Bayfront Park Management Trust hired a contractor to install the outdoor gym equipment in Maurice A. Ferré Park in the fall — sparking outrage among a group of neighbors who said they were never informed.
Then in November, after a downtown condo association filed an appeal, the city’s Planning, Zoning and Appeals Board voted to reverse the city Planning Department’s approval of the gym after determining that it was not installed according to proper permitting and design procedure and should not have been approved.
In early May, following the reversal from the appeals board, Carollo asked his colleagues on the City Commission to send the question to voters. His request came in the form of a “pocket item,” meaning it was not included on the publicly available meeting agenda. Carollo said he brought the proposal forward on “an emergency basis” to ensure there was enough time to get it on the August ballot. It passed with a 3-1 vote.
Two weeks after that, the City Commission upheld the appeals board decision, effectively directing the gym equipment to be removed.
“The case law says you cannot hide the ball, you cannot have a question that flies under false colors,” Marc Burton, an attorney for the plaintiffs, said Wednesday. “This does both. It hides the ball because it doesn’t disclose to voters that this project has already been deemed to violate the city code in a final decision and that the voters would effectively be overriding, in some unclear legal mechanism, the City Commission’s final zoning determination.”
In response to Burton’s comment, Carollo said of the plaintiffs: “What they’re trying to do is take the ball, the glove and the bat from voters.” He also said the decision to install gym equipment in the park wasn’t made by him alone, but by the entire Bayfront Park Management Trust board.
Valdes said that, at best, the Elections Department could exclude the results for that specific question from official reports and abstain from posting them to the county website. However, he said the results would still be available through a public records request.
In denying the temporary injunction, Rodriguez pointed to the lack of remedies available due to the time constraints.
Rodriguez noted, however, that “all parties conceded at the hearing that the Court may consider whether to declare the Referendum null and void even after the election has already taken place” and that “the issue can be challenged post-election.”
The plaintiffs plan to do so.
“The Court’s decision makes clear that we may continue to pursue our effort to protect the integrity of the electoral process even after the election is held, and we intend to do so,” Burton, the plaintiffs’ attorney, said in a statement.
The city did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
This story was originally published August 15, 2024 at 6:28 PM.
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