A Miami commissioner running for mayor defended his staff after surveillance video caught one office staffer removing a mayoral opponent’s yard sign from a swale in The Roads community on Tuesday.
Members of District 3 City Commissioner Joe Carollo‘s office removed the signs to protect citizens, not Carollo’s mayoral campaign, Carollo said.
Opponent disputes explanation
One of his opponents, Emilio Gonzalez, disagrees. One of Gonzalez’s neighbors recorded video of the Carollo staffer removing Gonzalez’s campaign signs.
“That’s wrong,” Anna Suarez-Burgos, a Gonzalez supporter, said.
Suarez-Burgos had three signs in the grass she maintains outside her fence. After someone removed them, Suarez-Burgos nailed replacements to trees she planted in the swale.
“We put signs up,” she said. “They go away. We put the signs up again. They go away and who would have believed, I never in my life thought it was Joe Carollo taking those signs off.”
City code and visual pollution
Carollo showed CBS News Miami photos of signs his office collected from public spaces like medians and swales over the last seven years. Five staff members search, find and remove signs every day, Carollo said. They target more than political signs, according to Carollo. His team removed a pile of mostly junk car and rental ads on Thursday, Carollo said.
City code does restrict signs in public right-of-ways. However, it does not name Carollo’s staff as code enforcers.
When asked why his team removes signs, Carollo replied, “Because if not, our city would look like pure fourth-world.”
“Forget about the visual pollution,” Carollo added. “These signs in all of the streets and all our main thoroughfares and others distract people from driving.”
Accusations of election interference
Carollo accuses Gonzalez of breaking city law. Gonzalez accuses Carollo of abuse of power.
“They can lean on any number of ordinances about what you can and can’t put in a swale, but in an election period this smells of election interference,” Gonzalez said. “It smells of voter intimidation. Imagine for the neighbors, you’re standing here minding your own business and all of a sudden an official city truck comes by and just arbitrarily starts taking your freedom of expression and dumping it in the back of a pickup truck.”
