From knocking landfills to wanting another one: Mayor criticized for incinerator switch

In attacking Mayor Daniella Levine Cava’s recommendation for Miami-Dade to indefinitely rely on landfills to dispose of millions of tons of garbage per year, her Democratic allies on the County Commission on Tuesday turned to a recent report to argue against the plan.

The report was a Levine Cava memo from eight weeks ago.

“Heavy reliance on trucking and rail also contributes to a bigger carbon footprint through the long-haul transport of waste,” Levine Cava wrote in the Nov. 22 memo that urged commissioners to vote for building a modern garbage incinerator in Doral that would use technological advances to all but eliminate odor and reduce emissions. “Long term dependence on landfill disposal is not sustainable financially nor environmentally.”

That’s not the mayor’s recommendation anymore. On Saturday, she released a memo that highlighted the daunting economics and approval process for a $1.5 billion incinerator to replace the one that burned down in Doral two years ago.

Instead of voting to build a new incinerator in Doral, Levine Cava over the weekend recommended that commissioners vote to stick with existing trucking and disposal contracts that have Miami-Dade shipping tons of garbage to private landfills between Medley and Osceola County.

“We had a memo with facts from experts saying landfilling was the worst option, from an environmental lens and from a financial lens,” said Commissioner Danielle Cohen Higgins, a Democrat who endorsed Levine Cava’s reelection in 2024. “Two months later we are being asked to abandon the findings of a very detailed memo.”

Levine Cava explained the reversal in part on a realization that building an incinerator would be more daunting than she first thought, with opposition likely to extend the time and cost of winning approval for the facility.

“We definitely understand that the cost of building at any of these sites is very high. We dug down more,” she said at a press conference after the meeting. Asked if the Doral incinerator recommendation from November was misinformed, Levine Cava said no.

“With the information we had at the time, that was the recommendation,” she said. “We’ve been updating the information as it became available to us.”

Unmentioned Tuesday was the big change that happened in the county’s two-year debate over the future of the incinerator: President Donald Trump’s return to the White House.

A week after Levine Cava issued the Nov. 22 memo backing a new incinerator about 3 miles from Trump’s Doral resort, a son of the president, Eric Trump, began calling and meeting with commissioners to oppose the mayor’s plan. While there appeared to be a bipartisan coalition on the commission to put the incinerator in Doral before the Trump family’s intervention, that unity crumbled after the president’s son got involved, multiple insiders said.

No votes were taken at the rare special meeting of the County Commission, which convened Tuesday only to discuss issues related to garbage, trash and recycling.

Chairman Anthony Rodriguez said votes will be taken in February on whether to rebuild the incinerator and other matters related to long-term decisions on how to manage the roughly 1 million tons of garbage the incinerator burned each year before the February 2023 fire shuttered the facility. That was about half of what county sanitation trucks pick up on an average year.

The Sierra Club, an environmental advocacy group, praised Levine Cava’s shelving of the incinerator plan, which environmental groups fought against, citing the emissions created by burning trash. Ken Russell, a former city of Miami commissioner who now lobbies for the local Sierra Club chapter, said modern advances in landfill technology, paired with extra effort on recycling and composting, can make burying trash an ecologically friendly option.

“If the argument they try to make politically is to support the incinerator, they’re only going to talk about the worst versions of landfills,” said Russell, a former Democratic candidate for Congress. “I think it’s very big that the mayor has made the shift and is taking the hits for it. It’s the right thing to do.”

The mayor’s plan did not get that kind of an embrace from one of the most reliable votes on the commission for environmental groups, Eileen Higgins.

Higgins, a fellow Democrat and Levine Cava backer, accused the mayor of wiping prior recommendations from her memory.

“The administration does seem to have amnesia,” she said. “I think landfilling is a terrible idea and outrageously dangerous for our environment.”

This story was originally published January 29, 2025 at 5:00 AM.