Miami-Dade mayor changes incinerator plan and now wants to build it in Doral

Two months after recommending Miami-Dade County move its trash incinerator out of Doral, Mayor Daniella Levine Cava is reversing course and urging commissioners to keep it there.

The mayor’s Friday memo is the latest setback in Doral’s effort to rid itself of Miami-Dade’s trash-burning operation, which was halted by a fire at the county incinerator in early 2023.

READ MORE: Doral incinerator fire dilemmas: Where to dump Miami-Dade’s trash; where to rebuild?

With the county preparing to spend $1.5 billion on a modern replacement, Doral wants Miami-Dade to find another location. But some county commissioners have already said the current location makes the most economic sense and want Doral to cover the costs of more expensive alternatives.

After recommending a more remote site in northern Miami-Dade as recently as Sept. 13, Levine Cava now says Doral is the best option because others have more downsides.

“Through this process, I learned that there is no perfect site,” Levine Cava wrote in her memo to commissioners. “After an extensive analysis of hundreds of properties by County staff and expert consultants, it is evident that no site for the Campus is without controversy.”

Levine Cava said sites outside of Doral are too expensive and would require significant rate increases for the 350,000 homes that rely on Miami-Dade’s Solid Waste Department for garbage pick-ups or far too much of a financial burden on Doral taxpayers to cover the costs.

Her memo, based on analysis by county consultant Arcadis, estimates building an incinerator elsewhere in Miami-Dade would add about $800 million to the costs over 20 years. Doral has offered to contribute $40 million to the expenses of picking another site, but Levine Cava said the gap is too wide to consider the deal.

Her original recommendation, the county’s abandoned Airport West airfield, drew intense opposition from Miramar, the Broward County city that has neighborhoods about half a mile from the site.

While isolated when first built in the 1980s, the county’s Doral incinerator — designed to produce energy by burning garbage — sits about a tenth of a mile from residential subdivisions built up near it in the decades that followed.

In a statement, Doral Mayor Christi Fraga said Miami-Dade should spend more to relocate the incinerator to the kind of expansive site that will allow for future growth instead of the relatively cramped footprint available in her city. “We will not take ‘no’ for an answer,” Fraga said. Doral “should not be forced to sacrifice both its resources and quality of life for a plan that fails to adequately address the County’s long-term waste management needs.”

Friday she was reviewing Levine Cava’s memo ahead of the County Commission’s plan to vote on an incinerator site in the first week of December.

Levine Cava is pitching a modern incinerator as unlikely to cause the kind of resident complaints that the old one sparked in Doral. Current burning technology and contemporary designs all but eliminate the odor issues that were the primary gripe for neighbors.

Environmental groups are urging Miami-Dade to scrap burning trash entirely, and instead focus on efforts to reduce waste.

Levine Cava said she’s pushing Miami-Dade to recycle more and launch compositing initiatives but that Miami-Dade needs a new incinerator to continue growing.

Before the fire, the Doral incinerator burned about half of the garbage that Miami-Dade collected on a typical day — waste that’s now being shipped by truck and train to landfills across Florida. That’s unlikely to change in the coming years, with a new incinerator expected to take about a decade to get up and running.

Juan Carlos Bermudez, a former Doral mayor who now represents the city on the County Commission, said he was surprised Levine Cava changed her position after more than a year of having the Airport West site as her administration’s top pick.

“I can’t tell you how disappointed I am,” said Bermudez, who lives near the shuttered incinerator. “It’s disappointing to have a mayor who two months ago had an opinion, supported by the consultants, to choose a certain site. And then, two months later, there’s a different opinion. … One has to question whether there are special interests or political interests involved.”

READ MORE: Miami-Dade’s trash chief resigns after warning that a landfill crisis is coming

Levine Cava’s memo said an incinerator at the Airport West site would cost $269 million more to build than in Doral, plus an extra $20 million a year to operate.

While the Airport West site offered a larger footprint, Levine Cava said the Doral location still is the better pick even with Miami-Dade needing to build some related facilities on county land nearby.

Levine Cava first recommended the Airport West site as the best choice for a modern incinerator in August 2023, but said the administration would study other locations — including Doral — before making a final recommendation. She reaffirmed the Airport West pick in September.

In an interview, Levine Cava said the change in position was the result of more research as the commission moved closer to a final decision. She said new factors working against the Airport West site, which sits outside the county’s Urban Development Boundary, was the cost of mitigating the impact on wetlands on the property.

“When we originally came up with a recommendation, we knew we had to continue to do more work,” she said. “We had more time to do a deeper dive.”

This story was originally published November 22, 2024 at 6:58 PM.