The Trumps are fighting a Doral incinerator. A new Fla. bill would kill it
Update (May 2, 2025): As of Friday afternoon, multiple people tracking the bill privately declared it dead after the Florida House failed to pass the Florida Senate version. The bill’s sponsor, state Sen. Bryan Avila, said so publicly: “Unfortunately, the Florida House of Representatives did not agree with the policy.”
Original story:
A bill that’s already passed the Florida Senate would ban Miami-Dade from building a garbage incinerator at a site detested by President Donald Trump’s family — that is, the one the county’s mayor had wanted to construct a few miles from a Trump golf resort.
While the bill establishes a new one-mile buffer between an incinerator and residential communities, the specific language only applies to Miami-Dade and does not apply to homes in neighboring Broward County.
That means the bill would scuttle the county’s Doral incinerator plan, which Eric Trump lobbied against in the weeks after his father won the 2024 election. But the bill’s language is narrow enough that it would keep alive another potential Miami-Dade incinerator site near the Broward County line.
“This legislation is necessary because my residents have lost confidence in Miami-Dade County’s decision-making process,” said state Sen. Bryan Avila, who represents the Doral area and is the sponsor of the incinerator-ban legislation. In a statement, he slammed Miami-Dade for pursuing a second incinerator at the Doral site, where a 2023 fire shut down the original incinerator built there in the 1980s. “The residents and businesses of Doral should not have to live with the thought that one of these facilities could go up in flames at any moment.”
Avila’s proposed restrictions won’t matter if the House and Senate don’t pass the same version of House Bill 1609 before both chambers adjourn as early as Friday. While the Senate passed the latest version of the bill on Wednesday, it still needs a House vote.
If the House amends the language before passing it, the bill will go back to the Senate. If both chambers pass the same version, it would go on to Gov. Ron DeSantis for his signature before becoming law.
Asked whether the Trump Organization contacted him about the bill, Avila said he “heard concerns” from the president’s hotel company as well as “numerous other businesses in the area.” While Trump himself hasn’t spoken publicly about the incinerator, his son who runs the family’s resort company, Eric Trump, promised in January: “We will fight it.”
It’s not clear whether the Trump Organization even needs a Florida law to keep a new incinerator out of Doral.
Last year, County Mayor Daniella Levine Cava favored building a modern replacement for the old Doral incinerator. While the site used to be a remote industrial area, residential subdivisions over the years have crept to within a mile of the trash-burning facility.
Doral has been fighting to move the incinerator for years. Though it has been a longtime resort owner in Doral, the Trump Organization hadn’t joined the fight until after the election, when Eric Trump began meeting with county commissioners to urge them to reject Levine Cava’s plan to rebuild the incinerator on the same site. At the time, Trump had upended county politics by winning Miami-Dade by 11 points — the first Republican presidential candidate to come out on top there since 1988.
Levine Cava backed off her Doral recommendation and said the county would explore other options — including the continued use of trucks and trains to ship Miami-Dade’s garbage to landfills in Central Florida.
That route leaves it open for a future commission vote to put a new incinerator back in Doral or to consider other sites, including an abandoned county airfield in the northern part of Miami-Dade that’s known as Airport West, which sits within a mile of the Sunset Lakes subdivision in Broward’s Miramar.
The proximity to Sunset Lakes could have been enough to eliminate the Airport West site under the Senate bill, although the mile is measured from the future incinerator’s smoke stacks, so it’s difficult to know for sure without specific plans. But language in the amended version that passed the Senate narrows the residential restriction to only homes that are in the same county as the proposed incinerator.
That disparity — with Broward homes denied the same one-mile buffer as Miami-Dade homes — is clearly unfair, Miramar Mayor Wayne Messam told the Miami Herald on Thursday.
“If an incinerator within a mile of Doral homes should not be constructed, why should it be any different for the residents of Miramar? It makes no sense,” Messam said. “Why should Miramar be treated any differently?”
This story was originally published May 1, 2025 at 5:01 PM.