City of Miami to pay Joe Carollo $770K to settle decades-old pension dispute
The city of Miami plans to make a major payout to former Commissioner Joe Carollo to settle a pension-related lawsuit Carollo filed against the city 20 years ago.
Next week, the Miami City Commission is slated to vote on a $770,000 settlement for Carollo, who was termed out of office in December after eight consecutive years as a city commissioner representing the area that includes Little Havana.
The payout might be a tough pill to swallow for Carollo’s former colleagues, who recently voted for the city to sue Carollo over the legal fees it spent defending him in a separate high-profile lawsuit. Carollo lost that case in 2023, with a jury awarding $63.5 million to Little Havana businessmen Bill Fuller and Martin Pinilla, finding that they were victims of a political retaliation campaign pushed by Carollo after they supported his opponent in the 2017 election.
While the city has spent years in court responding to various lawsuits related to Fuller and Pinilla, the latest Carollo payout is unrelated to those cases.
In 2006, years after losing a reelection bid for mayor, Carollo sued the city over a pension dispute. He argued in the complaint that the city approved legislation in the early 2000s that “significantly reduced” his yearly pension benefit.
At the time, elected officials in the city were eligible for pensions, but the program was later frozen during the financial crisis. In the fall of 2024, Commissioners Christine King and Miguel Angel Gabela sponsored legislation to bring back pensions for the city’s elected officials, but a rare veto from then-Mayor Francis Suarez torpedoed those efforts.
Carollo’s pension complaint sat mostly dormant for years, until recent legal maneuverings brought it back to the City Commission. Last month, Miami commissioners had a closed-door attorney-client session known as a shade meeting to discuss the pension lawsuit, indicating that a potential settlement was on the horizon.
Carollo’s recent efforts to recoup pension benefits are what triggered Gabela in March to revisit an earlier proposal to claw back legal fees in the lawsuit that Carollo lost in 2023. The city acknowledged that the move was largely symbolic; Fuller and Pinilla have yet to collect on the $63.5 million judgment they won, with the courts ruling that Carollo’s Coconut Grove home and his wages are shielded from seizure.
During the March meeting, City Attorney George Wysong said Carollo’s pension benefits would be “immune” from collection but that efforts to claw back legal fees could provide the city “leverage” elsewhere.
Reached by phone Tuesday, Carollo said his leadership brought in money for the city, pointing to various revenue streams in the city that he said he’s responsible for, like parking fees and various revenue sources for Bayfront Park Management Trust, the quasi-independent city agency Carollo presided over as chairman until he was ousted last year.
“Just this year alone, you have over $55 million in the budget that, if Joe Carollo had not ever been mayor or commissioner, you would not have it in the budget,” Carollo told the Miami Herald.
But as a central figure in several high-profile lawsuits, Carollo has also cost the city money during his most recent stints in office. That includes multiple Fuller- and Pinilla-related cases; a lawsuit filed by the former police chief, Art Acevedo; and a lawsuit from the city’s insurer, which has argued it’s not responsible for millions in Carollo-related legal fees.
One Fuller-related case resulted in a $12.5 million settlement in 2024. Another is slated to go to trial in January.
In the insurance lawsuit, Carollo’s city-appointed outside counsel abruptly halted its representation of Carollo earlier this year, leaving the former city commissioner without an attorney in that matter.
Carollo said Tuesday that he still hasn’t hired a lawyer to replace his former legal team: “I’ll represent myself the best way I can in that.”
This story was originally published May 19, 2026 at 4:19 PM.
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