Where will Miami-Dade build a new garbage incinerator? Showdown vote set for Tuesday

Miami-Dade County commissioners are set to make what could be their most contentious decision in years: where to build a new garbage incinerator.

A vote on the location is scheduled at Tuesday’s 9:30 a.m. commission meeting at the Stephen P. Clark Government Center in downtown Miami. Members of the public are allowed to address commissioners ahead of the vote, and a long line of speakers is expected on a showdown that’s been brewing for years.

READ MORE: ‘Nobody wants it’: Community speaks out in hearing ahead of Miami-Dade incinerator vote

Doral is lobbying to get the county’s trash-burning operation out of the city, where it had been burning nearly half of Miami-Dade’s trash before a fire shut down the facility in early 2023. Miami-Dade County Mayor Daniella Levine Cava wants to build a modern replacement on an abandoned county airfield on the northern edge of Miami-Dade known as Airport West, a site close enough to Miramar that the Broward County city is vowing a court fight to block construction.

Environmental groups allied with Levine Cava are opposing the mayor on this issue, demanding that Miami-Dade rethink a return to trash burning and urging the county to prioritize waste reduction instead. Developers warn that any detour from the county’s plan to resume garbage burning within a decade will risk the future of home building if Miami-Dade can’t show it has a place to put the tons of trash that come with construction.

Here is a look at the options ahead of commissioners for the vote:

Keep the incinerator in Doral

This is the quickest and cheapest option, given the county has operated an incinerator on the site off of Northwest 97th Avenue since 1982. A 2023 report by county consultant Arcadis estimated that building a modern incinerator on the existing Doral site would cost $1.5 billion and take roughly eight years, including securing federal and state permits. That’s about a 6% lower cost and two years shorter for construction than the Airport West site, the report said.

Doral has been fighting being the home to a new incinerator since well before the first one caught fire on Feb. 12, 2023. In July 2022, commissioners voted to build a modern incinerator at the existing site in anticipation of needing to update the 1980s-era facility.

Board members agreed to revisit that decision after the fall elections that year brought in a chief advocate for a move: former Doral mayor Juan Carlos Bermudez, who purchased a new home in 1999 that is less than a mile from the incinerator site.

In a Friday memo, Levine Cava pointed out that of all the potential incinerator sites, the existing 157-acre campus in Doral is closest to residential neighborhoods. As the Doral area has grown, homes have been built within a tenth of a mile of the incinerator, according to a county analysis.

Key to the decision may be Doral’s willingness to lower the county’s cost for building an incinerator elsewhere. At a city meeting earlier this month, Doral council members agreed to negotiate with Miami-Dade to divert some property taxes from neighborhoods around the existing incinerator to subsidize Miami-Dade’s incinerator expenses, but county commissioners haven’t said whether the offer is enough.

Move the incinerator north near Miramar

Damage from Hurricane Wilma shut down the old Opa-locka West airfield in 2005, leaving the spot once used by small planes all but idle for the last two decades. It sits just south of the Broward County line, and the 416-acre parcel is Levine Cava’s pick for the new site for an electricity-producing incinerator.

Like Doral, the site now called “Airport West” has enough land for Miami-Dade to build both an incinerator and other facilities needed for garbage processing, including for mulching, composting and other recycling options. A county analysis found the site would likely be the easiest to clear modern federal air-quality requirements for a new incinerator, in part because it sits farther away from the federal Everglades National Park than the Doral site does.

READ MORE: Doral floats idea to pay Miami-Dade at least $20M in taxes to relocate trash incinerator

Miramar sits less than a mile from the site, and the city with a sizable Black population is fighting the potential incinerator move as unjust. Miami-Dade’s NAACP chapter said in a social media post Sunday that it opposed the Airport West site, saying, “Our communities are not dumping grounds for environmental hazards.”

Levine Cava maintains that modern incinerator technology will eliminate the kind of neighborhood complaints about odors that have fueled Doral’s opposition to the facility.

The Airport West site sits off North Okeechobee Road and north of Northwest 186th Street. That’s about 3 miles outside of the county’s Urban Development Boundary (UDB), which serves as a buffer between suburban construction and the county’s wetlands, agricultural belt and other sensitive areas.

The Tropical Audubon Society and other environmental groups oppose the site, too. The Arcadis report notes the land has wetlands and other potential environmental hiccups, including being a foraging ground for the endangered Florida bonneted bat.

Acquire private land for the county’s trash-burning operation

Two private landowners are pitching their sites as good options for Miami-Dade’s future incinerator. One is a 100-acre site in Medley, less than 2 miles north of the Doral location. The other is a 65-acre tree farm that sits southwest of the Airport West site. The Medley site is inside the Urban Development Boundary; the tree farm is not.

While the Medley site is near transportation routes, including a rail line, Levine Cava said the private property brings extra costs that Miami-Dade doesn’t face with land it already owns.

Levine Cava said in her Friday memo that the tree-farm site, offered by Miami developer David Martin, is too small to give Miami-Dade the kind of modern Solid Waste “campus” it needs for the future of garbage processing in the decades to come.

Delay a final decision on a new “Waste to Energy” plant

Some environmental advocates want Miami-Dade to ditch its incinerator strategy all together for a full focus on a “zero-waste” approach that reduces garbage output enough to eliminate the need to burn it. While Miami-Dade is shipping its garbage by truck and train to landfills across Florida, the county considers transportation too expensive to be sustainable.

Levine Cava’s memo notes that no U.S. city has reached the kind of zero-waste goals Miami-Dade would need to consider not building an incinerator. But a push to drill down on that option could delay Tuesday’s scheduled vote. Commissioners could also opt to delay if they wanted to consider other private land deals, or give the administration more time to negotiate terms with Doral or other players in potential incinerator agreements.