Unhappy with the bathrooms at MIA? The airport’s cleaning company is, too

Even the janitorial company earning $34 million a year at Miami International Airport thinks the place should be cleaner.

“It doesn’t look the way I would like it to look,” Matt Noe, president of C&W Services, said Wednesday before a county committee deciding whether to award the Boston company another five-year contract at MIA.

Noe blamed MIA’s cleanliness problems on the airport’s refusal to spend more on janitorial staff even as the county-run facility chased airlines, new routes and the thousands of additional passengers that come with them.

“We made multiple requests to increase staff and were denied,” Noe said.

He said MIA’s red tape also gets in the way of improving things — like when C&W Services offered to replace broken paper towel dispensers in airport bathrooms at no cost but airport staff said county contracting rules would require a bidding process first.

“We are simply being set up to fail at MIA by the airport’s inability to support and take action of ‘low hanging fruit’ proposals provided by C&W Services to improve not only services but the current perception the public has about MIA,” Milly Diaz, a C&W regional director, wrote in a 2022 email shared with members of the County Commission’s Airport Committee.

The committee didn’t accept Noe’s explanation, rejecting Mayor Daniella Levine Cava’s recommendation to award C&W the new contract and voting to turn over janitorial duties to a pair of C&W competitors in a five-year deal that would pay significantly more for cleaning staff. The proposal must pass the full board of commissioners to advance, with the final contracts coming back to the board again for approval.

Committee members said public frustration with MIA is too high to stick with a company that’s been cleaning the airport for more than 20 years.

Commissioner Kevin Cabrera, the committee’s chair, supplied a photo of a six-inch strand of dust hanging from a sprinkler on a bathroom ceiling, which he and his office staff discovered during what he described as a surprise airport inspection they conducted last week.

“I think it’s important today we make a change,” said Cabrera, who’s planning to resign from the commission this year to become President Donald Trump’s ambassador to Panama. “Our passengers are not happy. We see it on social media. We see it in their complaints. We see it on TV.”

Commissioners also knocked C&W for blaming poor results on the terms of a contract the company agreed to, saying C&W could have had its lobbyists press the County Commission for changes if it would have left MIA cleaner.

“When private companies are doing business with MIA, we expect them to look forward,” Commissioner Danielle Cohen Higgins said.

Conditions at MIA have been a sore spot for Levine Cava, who ousted the airport director she inherited after taking office in 2020.

Last year, she introduced “Lightning Teams” to tackle quick repair jobs and respond to passenger complaints about service, cleanliness and other airport issues. She also won commission approval for about $800 million worth of upgrades, including bathroom renovations and replacements of aging escalators, elevators and motorized walkways.

As one of the country’s busiest airports, MIA’s shortcomings regularly pop up on social media, including the July video of green liquid gushing from a terminal ceiling from what the airport said was a broken pipe in the air-conditioning system. The ridicule amplified concerns in County Hall that Florida’s Republican-controlled Legislature will attempt to remove MIA from Miami-Dade government and place it under the control of a state-appointed board.

A fight for who gets to clean Miami International Airport’s bathrooms

C&W, a division of the commercial real estate operator Cushman & Wakefield, won its current contract in 2019, before the COVID pandemic upended air travel across the country. In the rebound, MIA saw record traffic, boosted by additional American Airlines flights and new carriers, including the low-cost Spirit Airlines. In 2023, more than 52 million passengers used the airport, up 16% from 2019.

Airport administrators said their hands were tied by the 2019 contract, which had fixed yearly C&W payments whether passenger volume increased or decreased. C&W said that in 2021 it asked the airport to increase yearly payments by $1.3 million to station more janitors as bathroom attendants, but that idea was rejected.

“We were told that the airport did not have the finances” to pay that, Diaz, the C&W director, wrote in her 2022 email, which carried the subject line “Confidential- MIA - Action Plan.”

She also wrote that MIA declined to help C&W manage both the post-pandemic growth and maintenance issues that make it harder for the company to keep the airport clean.

“No consideration is made to changes in the passenger population, overall facilities conditions at MIA (building falling apart), increases to costs and consumption that impact finances,” she wrote.

Last year, Levine Cava recommended that commissioners award the airport’s new $261 million janitorial contract to C&W, which also received the top score from an internal county selection panel. The two companies backed by the Airport Committee have cleaning contracts in major airports across the country. They are ABM out of New York, whose airport clients include Boston, Chicago and New York’s LaGuardia and JFK; and Flagship, out of Dallas, whose airport clients include Tampa, Orlando and Houston.

C&W’s other airport clients include Boston, Los Angeles and Seattle.

The competitors all proposed technology upgrades to keep MIA clean. C&W said it would install “smart stall” technology with electronic indicators when a toilet is occupied and digital screens outside alerting passengers to the occupancy situation inside the restroom.

The proposed five-year janitorial contract has more money, with MIA allocating about $52 million a year for cleaning instead of the $34 million C&W is currently earning.

In an interview, Ralph Cutié, the county’s Aviation director, said the proposed janitorial contract also is more flexible in allowing MIA to increase payments if the airport gets busier in order to deploy more janitorial staff.

“It’s going to have a lot more flexibility to keep the bathrooms clean and the terminals clean,” he said.

This story was originally published February 12, 2025 at 5:06 PM.